158 Intelligence and Miscellaneous Articles. 



of potassium and oxynitrion, and so forth, an opinion which he has 

 subsequently endeavoured to establish in a more comprehensive in- 

 quiry published in conjunction with Professor Miller. 



Although this view agrees with that first put forward by Sir 

 Humphry Davy regarding the composition of salts, and though much 

 may be said in its favour upon purely chemical grounds, as has been 

 done by Berzelius in the third volume of his Lehrbuch, yet many 

 more reasons may be brought against it, as stated by Berzelius in 

 the same place ; amongst which one of the principal is, that neither 

 oxysulphion nor any of the analogous compounds has ytt been 

 prepared. 



Almost all those who have occupied themselves with the decom- 

 position of salts by the galvanic current since Daniell and Miller, 

 have found themselves obliged to admit the correctness of Daniell's 

 explanation. This is the case especially with Professor BuiF, in his 

 memoir upon the Law of Electrolysis ; De la Rive in the recently 

 published second part of his Traite d'electricite ; and E. Becquerel 

 in his memoir Des lois qui prisident a '© decomposition electro- 

 chimique des corps. Hittorff alone, in his investigation of the tra- 

 velling of the ions, starts from a different explanation, which, how- 

 ever, does not appear to get rid of the difficulties of the case. 



The author has, in the first plaee, repeated Daniell's experiments. 

 He obtained the same general results ; but a full equiv. of acid and base 

 was not always separated for 1 equiv. of oxygen, the former amounting 

 only to between 60 and 80 per cent, of the equiv. of the oxygen. He 

 then passed to the explanation of this apparently double decomposi- 

 tion, and shows that for this purpose Daniell's supposition is unne- 

 cessary. He is much more inclined to conclude from his experi- 

 ments, that to separate a simple body from a compound the same 

 force is always required, whether it is combined with only one simple 

 body to form a binary, or with several bodies to form a saline com- 

 pound. 



Starting from this point, it is not difficult to* prove that Faraday's 

 law of equivalent decomposition is applicable not only to binary, but 

 also to saline and all other inorgaitic compounds. 



Daniell, as appears from his reply tS the objections raised againsthim 

 by Dr. Hare, found himself compelled to adopt his theory, especially 

 because he could in no other way explain how the same current which 

 bore the metal to the negative ele«rode should convey the oxygen 

 and acid, and consequently two bodies in the opposite direction. But 

 a transference, in the sense in which Daniell appears to have under- 

 stood it, does not take place ; and it inay be shown, at least in cer- 

 tain cases, that for I equiv. of m<^al or hydrogen which is set free 

 at the negative electrode, 1 equiv^of acid and 1 equiv. of oxygen 

 must be set free at the positive electrode. 



In order to mark these cases more decidedly, the author next 

 occupied himself with the conditions under which the separation of 

 a substance takes place from an electfolyte in which several sepa- 

 rable substances ate present. He has found that the separation de- 

 pends, — 



