106 Oil the. Muriatic Ether. 



translate M. Gchlen's memoir ; and as it has a great siiiii^ 

 larity to mine, I shall give the following extract : 

 ■ M. Gehlen made muriatic ether with the smoking muriate 

 of tin and alcohol, by employing an equal part in weight of 

 boih. ^Hc also made it in Basse's method (a chemist of Ha- 

 meln), by a mixture of sea-salt, concentrated sulphuric acid 

 and alcohol, from which it was never thought that any 

 thing else than sulphuric ether could be extracted. He ob- 

 tained none with thciTiurialic acid alone. In short, M. GelY- 

 Icn recognibcd most of the properties which I did in the 

 muriatic ether. Thus he saw that this ether is ntost fre- 

 quently in the state of gas, that it liquefies at about + 10° of 

 Reaumur, that it is slightly soluble in water, that it has a 

 saccharine taste, that it does not redden turnsole tincture, 

 that it does not precipitate the nitrate of silver, and that 

 when wc burn it a great quantity of muriatic acid is de- 

 veloped. M. Gehlen made no experiment, however, to prove 

 from whence this muriatic acid came, or to ascertain the 

 quantity produced by the etherized gas ; neither did he 

 attempt to establish the theory of this etherification. It is 

 in this . respect only that my labours differ from his. We 

 differ a little also, but not remarkably, as to the process I 

 employed for making the muriatic ether, and by rpeans of 

 which I obtained in an instant probably more ether than by 

 any other, and an ether purer also than M. Gehlen's, since 

 his weighed 845 only, and mine 874, a greater specific 

 gravity in the present instance being a proof of greater 



Having no doubt, from the above, that tne muriatic 

 ether had been made in Gerniany, and that its property of 

 producing muriatic acid when burning w^s also known ; 

 and convinced as I was on the other hand, that. in France 

 and Spain the fact was unknown, I endeavoured to ascer- 

 tain if the English chemists knew any thing of the matter. 

 For this purpose I applied to M. RiffJuilt, the superintendant 

 of the gunpowder manufactories, and who was at that mo- 

 ment translating the third edition of Thomson's System of 

 Chemistry, a work full of erudition, and begun long after 



M. Geh!en*s 



