42 SEVENTH REPORT—1837. ; 
The benefit resulting from this process, is in the facility which it 
affords of fusing scraps, or old platina wire into lumps, from which it 
may be remodelled for new apparatus. 
The largest masses were fused agreeably to my original plan of 
keeping the gases in different receptacles, and allowing them to meet 
during efflux. 
T have, however, operated in the large way upon the plan contrived 
and employed by Newman, Brooke, Clarke, and others, having em- 
ployed as much as thirty gallons in one operation of the mixture of the 
gaseous elements of water. This I was enabled to do with safety, by 
an improvement in Hemming’s safety tube. In this improved form 
Ihave allowed the gas to explode as far into the tubes of efflux as 
the point where the contrivance in question was interposed, at least 
a hundred times, without its extending beyond it. 
Still, however, the other mode in which the gases are kept separate, 
until they meet in passing out of their respective receptacles, is less 
pregnant with anxiety, if not with risk. As these elements are known 
to explode by the presence of several metals, other mysterious modes 
may be discovered. 
Having made a self-regulating reservoir of chlorine, by suspending 
lump peroxide of manganese in concentrated chlorohydric acid, I was 
surprised by a violent explosion on presenting leaf metal to the jet tube. 
Ihad made similar apparatus before and have repeated the process 
with the same materials since, without a repetition of the explosive re- 
action. It might be inferred, that the protoxide of chlorine was 
generated, but the colour of the gas was so inferior in intensity to 
that of chlorine, as to lead me to suppose that there was some irregu- 
larity, before testing it with Dutch gold leaf. It has occurred to me 
that there may be a dichloride of hydrogen, which may explode with 
chlorine, and that of these the mixture consisted which produced the 
phenomenon in question. 
In freezing water, by the vaporization of ether, the labour of pump- 
ing is lessened, and the pump protected from a disadvantageous intro- 
duction ofthe vapour, by interposing sulphuric acid. If the stem of a 
funnel, with a cock, be luted into the tubulure of a retort, and the beak 
of the latter into the neck of a receiver, of which the tubulure com- 
municates with an air-pump,—on placing water in the funnel, ether in the 
retort, and sulphuric acid in the receiver, and exhausting, then allowing 
the water to descend into the ether, the congelation of the water is 
rapidly effected. Of course the acid absorbs the etherial vapour with 
great force, and the resulting mixture or rather combination requires 
a temperature of at least 280° for its ebullition. This is less con- 
sistent with the doctrine of Mitscherlich than that of Hennell. 
ome aS 
