190 



THE ALUMNI JOURNAL. 



with signal success, in albuminoid solu- 

 tions, and particularly when the in- 

 tegrity of flavors is desired, and where 

 ferments are wasted and made inert by 

 heat, or their power diminished by the 

 production of secondary products of little 

 value. 



An incidental advantage of the process 

 is that unskilled labor can be used, and 

 that in whatever way the process maybe 

 employed in its industrial applications, 

 the by-product ice has some compensating 

 value to offset the fuel account. 



East Orange, N. J. 



ARGON. 



Lord Rayleigh delivered a lecture on 

 " Argon," on the 5th inst., at the Royal 

 Institution of Great Britain, which 

 naturally proved a great attraction, and 

 the lecture theatre was crowded half an 

 hour before the commencement, the 

 audience including Mr. A. J. Balfour, M. 

 P. , Sir Frederick Abel, Sir Henry Roscoe, 

 M. P., Professors Dewar, Riicker, Ram- 

 say and Roberts Austen. 



The lecture resolved itself into a popu- 

 larized version of the communication 

 read before the Royal Society on January 

 31 , but several facts of additional interest 

 were disclosed, and various methods for 

 the preparation of argon experimentally 

 described. 



At the outset, Lord Rayleigh referred 

 to the lecture which he gave some four 

 or five years ago on the densities of 

 oxygen and hydrogen gases, and the con- 

 clusions drawn therefrom, and described 

 the experiments which caused him to sus- 

 pect the presence of another constituent 

 in the atmosphere. In the first of these 

 a process introduced by Professor Vernon 

 Harcourt, air was bubbled through liquid 

 ammonia, the relative weight of the nitro- 

 gen so obtained being noted. After con- 

 cordant results had been obtained, nitro- 

 gen was prepared by the ordinary process 



in which air is passed over red hot cop- 

 per, when copper oxide is formed, and it 

 was noticed that the relative weight of 

 the gas so liberated was T1J V P art more 

 than the mean of that prepared by the 

 first process. This was three years ago, 

 and the discrepancy troubled him a good 

 deal, various theories being advanced to 

 explain it. The most useful suggestion 

 was one made by "Nature'' to the effect 

 that, by the first process partial dissocia- 

 tion ol the nitrogen from the ammonia 

 had taken place. 



If that were true, the discrepancy was 

 explained at once, but the theory was 

 discredited — first, by storing a sample of 

 chemically prepared nitrogen for several 

 months, when no change occurred ; and 

 secondly, by the fact that the silent 

 electric discharge had no sensible effect 

 on nitrogen prepared by either process. 

 Further, the difference between the 

 relative weight of the two gases was con- 

 firmed by preparing "chemical" nitro- 

 gen by a variety of other processes, and 

 by bubbling oxygen instead of air through 

 the ammonia in Harcourt' s process Gen- 

 erally speaking, it was found that 

 "chemical" nitrogen was y 2 percent, 

 lighter than "atmospheric" nitrogen. 

 At this stage in the research he asked 

 himself: " what evidence have we that 

 the nitrogen of the air is all of the same 

 kind ? " and on setting this question to 

 Professor Dewar, was referred by him to 

 Cavendish's work. Lord Rayleigh re- 

 ferred in detail to that chemist's re- 

 searches on the composition of the air, 

 and showed the Wimshurst's electrical 

 machine which was employed for spark- 

 ing mixtures of common air and dephlo- 

 gisticated air (oxygen) ; at the same 

 time pointing out how Cavendish to a 

 great extent solved with his crude ap- 

 paratus the question now raised after a 

 lapse of more than a century. Indeed, 

 he had himself used a modification of 



