232 Intelligence and Miscellaneous Articles. 



Besides, it would be exceedingly unscientific, in cases where 

 power is wanting, to employ a part only, when the whole is avail- 

 able j or, as in the present instance, to employ the difference only, 

 instead of the sum of the reciprocating electric forces. 



Hence the obvious advantage of the unio- directive discharger, 

 which places the whole of the excited force at the disposal of the 

 experimenter, and gives to the magnetic electrometer a degree of 

 importance which it could never have possessed without it. 



Now, it appears by a paper in the Phil. Mag. for March last, that 

 my friend Mr. Watkins had become somewhat alarmed by the publi- 

 cation of my experiments which were made at the Adelaide Exhi- 

 bition Rooms, thinking, no doubt, that it was an encroachment on 

 some claims which, he imagined, were due to himself and Mr. Sax- 

 ton. 



I was well aware, from the best sources of information, that no 

 apparatus for collecting and giving a proper direction to the excited 

 currents, had ever been applied to the magnet in the Adelaide 

 Rooms previously to my employing it on the evening of the 28th of 

 August, 1834-. I had also the satisfaction of ascertaining from Mr. 

 Maugham, chemical lecturer, who so kindly assisted me, and also 

 from the assistant present on that occasion, that no results like 

 those produced by my experiments had ever been known amongst 

 them. And it is singularly fortunate, for the cause of truth, that 

 even to this day no apparatus in the capacity of an unio-directive 

 discharger has ever been attached to that splendid magnetic elec- 

 trometer, with the solitary exception of that humble substitute which 

 I employed on that occasion. 



Indeed, the claims of Mr. Watkins have, from the first reading 

 of his paper, appeared to me, to be of that futile description which, 

 in his ardour to excel, he has himself eventually shown them 

 to be. 



The Phil. Mag. for the present month shows very clearly that 

 Mr. Watkins has not made even the slightest alteration, conse- 

 quently no improvement, in the original apparatus ! " Hence," 

 says that gentleman, M we have in every slow revolution two actions 

 and two reactions; one of these actions, it is true, tends to the same 

 direction as one of the reactions ; but still we have two directions 

 of the current, and these two are antagonizing, therefore we have 

 no TituE polar decomposition," &c. (p. 111.) 



My only business, at present, with this curious passage, is that 

 of directing the reader's attention to one unsophisticated fact ; and 

 no words, I imagine, could express more clearly than these do, that 

 Mr. Watkins has never yet accomplished " true polar decompo- 

 sition " by magnetic electricity ; nor is it possible to keep separate 

 the liberated constituents of any compound, by the form of appa- 

 ratus which he appears to have employed. 



The results of all such experiments as those Mr. Watkins claims 

 must ever be fortuitous, as it would be impossible to predict the 

 direction in which the predominating force, by any new machine, 

 would be exerted. 



