230 Institute of France. 



" Will all these discoveries revolutionize chemistry once more ? f 

 The new chemistry, wholly founded on experience, cannot change. 

 The old chemistry, coraplstely systematic, had various foimda- 

 tions upon which it could not stand. The new chemistry ad- 

 vances and enriches us as it proceeds ; but it changes nothing 

 notwithstanding " 



M. Theodore de Saussure has demonstrated, by the decom- 

 position of alcohol or spirit of wine and ether, that these two 

 substances are composed in the same wav as carbon and hydro- 

 gen, but combined with different portions of water reduced to 

 its elements, so that in alcohol these elements form one- third; 

 whereas in ether they form only one-fifth ! Thus, when by di- 

 stillation of alcohol with sulphuric acid we obtain ether, it is 

 because the acid has taken from the alcohol a portion of its water. 

 This same acid, if we employ it in a greater quantity, will take 

 up the whole of the water, and will reduce the alcohol to the 

 state of olefiant gas, a kind of carbonated hvdrogen gas highly 

 charged with carbon, and to which this name has been given, 

 because in burning it deposits oil. 



M. Mongez, in a memoir on the bronze of the aticients, has 

 proved from the experiments of M. Darcet, that it was not by 

 immersion in cold water that the bronze hardens, as is the case 

 with steel, but that it acquired its hardness when after being 

 made red hot it was allowed to cool slowly in the air. M. Dar- 

 cet has made cymbals in this way of an excellent tone, andAvhich 

 it was pretended could only be made in Turkey, and by one 

 vvorkman of Constantinople. 



' The falls of atmospheric stones, now that their reality has been 

 ascertained, have been so often observed, that the long incredulity 

 which people entertained on the subject, will speedily be the only 

 topic for surprise connected with them. There was a very re- 

 markable ph2enomenon of this description in the department of 

 the Lot and Garonne, on the 5th of September, attended as 

 usual by a serene sky, a great explosion, and a whitish cloud. 

 The number of stones was considerable, and they were dispersed 

 over a radius of a league. 



M. Cuvier has examined at Haerlem a petrified skeleton, ex- 

 tracted more than a hundred years ago from the quarries of 

 CEningen, near the lake of Constance, which Scheuchzer, a na- 

 turalist of Zurich, had taken for that of a man, and which he 

 had engraved as " the man who was a witness for the Deluge." 

 M. Cuvier has ascertained that this skeleton belonged to an un- 

 known and gigantic species of Salamander, as he had already 

 announced, on a simple view of the engraving, in his great work 

 on fossil animals. From not meeting with the fossil remains of 

 human beings, M. Cuvier thinks that man is the newest inhabi- 

 tant of the globe. M. De 



