THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 



MONTHLY. 



DECEMBER, 1900. 



OXYGEN AND THE NATURE OF ACIDS. 



[These selections from Priestley's account of the discovery of oxygen and from Lavoisier's 

 first formal presentations of his theory of acids are classical examples of scientific work 

 which will always be worth reading. They have also the historical interest due to the fact that 

 the discoveries they describe served as the turning-point of chemistry to the paths it has since 

 followed. The dates of publication were respectively 1775, 1776 and 1777. We realize the progress 

 of the century when we remember that these experiments are now among the first in an elemen- 

 tary course. These two papers are also representatives of two well-defined types of scientific 

 advance ; Priestley's discovery was one of the happy accidents that often reward the investiga- 

 tor, one of the cases where he reaps a hundred fold, while Lavoisier's work was the result of 

 gifted insight and careful consideration of the entire range of phenomena concerned. Lavoi- 

 sier had, as is shown in this paper, the faculty of giving the right meaning to the data acquired 

 by others. The phlogiston theory is now so much a matter of antiquity that it seems proper to 

 give the modern equivalents of some of Priestley's terms : Air is used by him in the modern 

 sense of gas, dephlogisticated air=oxygen, inflammable air=hydrogen, phlogisticated air=nitro- 

 gen, marine acid air=hydrochloric acid gas, fixed air=carbon dioxid, nitrous air=nitric oxid 

 (N O), dephlogisticated nitrous air=nitrous oxid (N 2 0), vitriolic acid air=sulphur dioxid, 

 mercurius calcinatus=red oxid of mercury.] 



ON DEPHLOGISTICATED AIR.* 



BY JOSEPH PRIESTLEY. 



THERE are, I believe, very few maxims in philosophy that have laid 

 firmer hold upon the mind than that air, meaning atmospherical 

 air (free from various foreign matters, which were always supposed to 

 be dissolved, and intermixed with it), is a simple elementary substance, 

 indestructible and unalterable, at least as much so as water is supposed 

 to be. In the course of my inquiries I was, however, soon satisfied that 

 atmospherical air is not an unalterable thing; for that phlogiston with 

 which it becomes loaded from bodies burning in it, and animals breath- 

 ing it, and various other chemical processes, so far alters and depraves 

 it, as to render it altogether unfit for inflammation, respiration and 

 other purposes to which it is subservient; and I had discovered that agi- 



* From 'Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air.' London, 1775. 



