oe 

XIV.—On the Products of the Destructive Distillation of Animal Substances. Part II. 
By Tuomas Anperson, M.D. 
(Read 21st April 1851.) 
I propose in the following pages to communicate to the Society the progress 
of my investigation of the products of the destructive distillation of animal sub- 
stances, the first part of which was published in the 16th volume of the Trans- 
actions. Since that period, partly owing to my numerous avocations, and partly 
to the inherent difficulties of the subject, less progress has been made than I had 
hoped or expected, but still I have accumulated some facts of considerable inte- 
rest, which I think deserving of the attention of the Society. 
It may be remembered that, in the paper just referred to, I announced the 
discovery, among those products, of picoline, which I formerly obtained from coal- 
tar, and of a new base, to which I gave the name of Petinine; and I entered 
pretty fully into the method adopted for the preparation of these substances, 
and of certain other bases, the existence of which I merely indicated, without at 
the time attempting to characterize them. On proceeding to the more minute 
investigation of these bases, I soon found that the quantity of material at my 
disposal was much too small to admit of satisfactory or complete results, although 
I had employed for their preparation above 300 pounds of bone-oil. I found 
it necessary, therefore, to begin ab initio with the preparation of the bases from 
another equally large quantity of the oil; and after going through the whole of 
the tedious processes described in my previous paper, with the expenditure of the 
labour of some months, I found my object again defeated by deficiency of mate- 
rial. After various experiments, which, though they led to no definite or con- 
clusive results, served to familiarize me with the nature and relations of the 
products obtained, I made up my mind once more to begin again; and being © 
resolved on this occasion not to be foiled in the same way as before, I used for my 
new preparation no less than 250 gallons of crude bone-oil, the weight of which was 
somewhat above a ton. The result of this process, though involving an immense 
amount of labour, has been satisfactory, not only in supplying me with a large 
amount of material, but has also enabled me to obtain many substances, some of 
them possessed of very remarkable properties, which had escaped my observation 
when operating on a smaller scale. 
The employment of so large quantity of material has, as might be expected, 
led to some modification of the process described in the first part of this paper, 
VOL. XX. PART II. 3x 
