CARBON. 53 



lishing, by reference to carbon, the atomic weight of silver. 

 We will simply reverse his results and apply them to the 

 atomic weight of carbon. He effected the combustion of 

 the acetate and the oxalate of silver, and, ])y weighing both 

 the residual metal and the carbon dioxide forined, he fixed 

 the ratio between these two substances. In the case of the 

 acetate his weighings show that for every gramme of me- 

 tallic silver the weights of CO2 were produced, which are 

 shown in the third column : 



Mean, .81448 



The oxalate of silver, ignited by itself, decomposes too 

 violently to give good results ; and for this reason it was not 

 used by Liebig and Redtenbacher. Maumene, however, 

 found that when the salt was mixed with sand the combus- 

 tion could be tranquilly effected. The oxalate employed, 

 however, with the exception of the sample represented in 

 the last experiment of the series, contained traces of nitrate, 

 so that these results involve slight errors. For each gramme 

 of silver the appended weights of CO2 were obtained : 



Now, one of these salts being formed by a bivalent and 

 the other by a univalent acid, we have to reduce both to a 

 common standard. Doing this, we have the following re- 

 sults for the ratio between the atomic weight of silver and 

 the molecular weight of COg ; if Ag = 1.00, 



