126 Rev.W.V. Harcourt on Lord Brougham's statements 



nothing incongruous to what we have now delivered. And 

 this circumstance was observed, that the newly-generated 

 steams did not only possess almost all the whole cavity of the 

 glass, but divers times without the assistance of heat of my 

 hand did break away in large bubbles through the ambient 

 liquor into the open air: so that the experiments with corro- 

 sive liquors seemed manifestly to prove, though not that air 

 may be generated out of water, yet that in general air may be 

 generated anew. 



" Lastly, to the foregoing arguments from experience, we 

 might easily subjoin the authority of Aristotle and of his fol- 

 lowers the schools, who are known to have taught that air 

 and water, being symbolizing elements in the quality of moist- 

 ure, are easily transmutable into each other*', but we shall 

 rather to the foregoing argument add this, drawn from rea- 

 son — that if, as Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus and others, 

 followed by divers modern naturalists, have taught, the dif- 

 ference of bodies proceeds but from the various magnitudes, 

 figures, motions, and textures of the small parts they consist 

 of (all the qualities that make them differ being deducible 

 from thence), there appears no reason why the minute parts of 

 water, and other bodies, may not be so agitated and connected 

 as to deserve the name of air ; for if we allow the Cartesian 

 hypothesis, according to which the air may consist of any 

 terrene or aqueous corpuscles, provided they be kept swim- 

 ming in the interfluent celestial matter, it is obvious that air 

 may be as often generated, as terrestrial particles, minute 

 enough to be carried up and down by the celestial matter, 

 ascend into the atmosphere. And if we will have the air to 

 be a congeries of little slender springs, it seems not impos- 

 sible, though it be difficult, that the small parts of divers bo- 

 dies may, by a lucky concourse of causes, be so connected as 

 to constitute such little springs, since water in the plants it 

 nourisheth is usually contrived into springy bodies, and even 

 the bare altered position and connexion of the parts of a 

 body may suffice to give it a spring that it had not before, as 

 may be seen in a thin and flexible plate of silver, into which, 

 by some strokes of a hammer, you may give a spring; and by 

 only heating it red-hot, you may make it again as flexible as 

 before. 



" These, my Lord, are some of the considerations at present 

 occurring to my thoughts, by which it may be made probable 

 that air may be generated anew." 



* This I presume is the hypothesis, doctrine, or theory which Cavendish 

 was suspected of deriving from Watt. 



