66 Dr. Kane on the Compounds 0/ Ammonia. 



Prop. TI. — That ammonia fiu-^is amidide of hydrogen, and should he written 



NH2 4" H. 



The re-examination of the results of Gay Lussac, Thenard, and Davy, on the 

 action of potassium on ammoniacal gas, gave to the interesting views of Dumas, 

 arising from the discovery of oxamide, a stability and importance which must be 

 considered as the origin of all subsequent investigations in that extensive field. 

 When we allow for the various sources of error to which, from the easy decom- 

 position of the resulting bodies, the quantitative determinations of the hydrogen 

 evolved from the ammonia is exposed, we shall find in the experiments of those 

 exact chemists a complete proof that potassium liberates from ammonia precisely 

 the same quantity of hydrogen as from water, and hence that the element 

 remaining united with the potassium is amldogene. The idea of ammonia being 

 itself a base differing essentially in constitution from the oxides of hydrogen or 

 of the metals, prevented the distinguished discoverer of oxamide from tracing in 

 the action of potassium on ammonia, the rational constitution of the latter, and 

 although he recognized completely the identity of function performed by the 

 metal in the one case, and the carbonic oxide in the other, yet it is evident, from 

 the tenor of his observations on all occasions, that he looked upon the abstraction 

 of the equivalent of hydrogen as subverting the constitution of the ammonia, 

 and that the amldogene resulting did not stand in any natural relation to the 

 ammoniacal gas employed. 



Notwithstanding the remarkable cases discovered and examined by Henry 

 Rose, in which the combinations of ammonia with the various classes of salts ap- 

 peared to correspond so closely with the same salts containing water of crystalli- 

 zation, whence, taken in connexion with the existence of the amldides of potassium 

 and sodium, the symmetricity of nHj and oh might be inferred, and the form 

 NHj.H given to the former ; yet, until the discovery of the composition of white 

 precipitate, and of the similar bodies which I examined, and which was funda- 

 mental to all these researches, instances of the resolution of ammonia into amldo- 

 gene and hydrogen, independent of all destructive action, had not become 

 sufficiently positive and unexceptionable to lead any chemist to express the 

 opinion of its being really amidide of hydrogen, ranking with the oxide and 

 chloride of the same element. This view, however, results almost unavoidably 



