On the Identity of Silex and Oxygen, 277 



It is true, there is also 2i flinty smell, or what the French 

 -call ** odeiir quarlzeuse;'* but this arises only when the flint 

 is employed in the act of collision with steel, or against some 

 Iciml of stone containing this scintillating ingredient, the 

 silex ; and, on such occasions, I have reason to believe, 

 ■some new compound is the result, in which the presence ot 

 oxyg-en may be traced to this origin and to no other. The' 

 <ef!*e.ct of €int upon steel is attended vvilh this singular cir- 

 'Cum&tanf e, that the particles which fly ofl' are obedient to 

 the loadstone, and consecjuently must be metallic; but, 

 the raetal is now dc])rived of its lustre and malleability, it is 

 a compound^ having imbibed a certain established dose of 

 oxygen, at the expense of the &ilcx, and tl>e nec:essary caloric 

 from the atmosphere. 



If an ore consist chiefly of lime, silex and metal, and, if 

 4his metal be saturated witii oxygen, t^e lime and^ indeed, 

 <the whole compound be tastless and quite insoluble in water, 

 what other inference can be drawn than this — that the silex 

 alone is the ostensible and primary cause, both of the insi- 

 fiidity of the lime and the oxidized condition of the metal ? 

 Cases of this nature occur very frequently : the ore, which 

 .produces the new metal titanium,is precisely of that spccieg| 

 for it is composed of nearly ^qual parts of t,he&e tkree in- 

 gredients, and nothing more besides.. 



7'he quantity of silex ia some ores., and in Tnineral sub- 

 stances containing acids and metallic oxides, is often very 

 great; in others there is scarcely any: but we may occa- 

 sionally trace it by its cffectfi, and account for its absence 

 from the condition of ihcn^gredleDts left in the ore. In the 

 following example, the quantity of silex remaining in the 

 compound secerns to be inversely as that of the oxygen, as 

 if nearly the whole had been expended, and converted into 

 the oxygen^ which is now blended with the metals. 



Thus, z specimen of wolfram, analysed by MM. Vau- 

 <|uelici and Hecht, contained in the hundred, QQ parts of 

 tungstic acid, 18 of black oxide of iron, 6*25 black oxide 

 of manganese, and only 1"5 of silex. Here, I would say, the 

 whole of the oxygen had been generated entirely at the ex- 

 pense of the original silex, of which a very little or rather 

 a mere surplus now remams in the ore. This is not only 



S3 . the 



