36 Sir H. Davy on the Relations 



ferred in the beginning of this Lecture. Finding that acid 

 and alkaline substances, even when existing in the most solid 

 combinations, or in the smallest proportion in the hardest 

 bodies, were elicited by voltaic electricity, I established that 

 they were the results of decomposition, and not of composi- 

 tion or generation; and referring to my experiments of 1800 

 and 1801 and 1802, and to a number of new facts, which 

 showed that inflannnable substances and oxygen, alkalies and 

 acids, and oxidable and noble metals, were in electrical re- 

 lations of positive and negative, I drew the conclusion, that 

 the combinations and dccompositioni by dcctricitij isei'e refers 

 rible to the law of electrical attractions and repidsions, and ad- 

 vanced the hypothesis, " that chemical and electrical attraction 

 were jjvoduced by the same catise, acting in one case on parti- 

 cles, in the other on masses/' and that the same property, under 

 different modifications, was the cause of all the phcenoviena exhi- 

 bited by different voltaic combinations. 



Believing that our philosophical systems are exceedingly 

 imperfect, I never attached much importance to this hypo- 

 thesis; but having formed it after a copious induction of 

 facts, and having gained immediately by the application of it 

 a number of practical results, and considering myself as much 

 the author of it as I was of the decomposition of the alkalies, 

 and having developed it in an elementary work, as far as the 

 present state of chemistry seemed to allow, I have never cri- 

 ticized or examined the manner in which different authors 

 have adopted or explained it, — contented, if in the hands of 

 others it assisted the arrangements of chemistry or minera- 

 logy, or became an instrument of discovery. And having 

 now given what I believe to be a faithful sketch of its origin, 

 I shall not enter into an examination of those works which 

 have induced me to make this sketch, and which contain par- 

 tial or loose statements on the subject, and which refer the 

 origin of electro-chemistry to Germany, Sweden and France, 

 rather than to Italy and England, and which attribute some 

 of the views of the science, which I first developed, to philo- 

 sophers who have never made any claim of the kind, and who 

 never could have made any, as their works on the subject 

 were published many years after 1806. 



III. On the modes adopted for detecting the electrical states of 

 bodies, and definitions of terms. 



That the statements made in the following sections may be 

 more distinct, I shall say a few words of the mode in which 

 the different conditions of electrical action were ascertained, 



and 



