338 DISCOURSE ON THE STUDY 



compared to those gigantic combinations which were 

 afterwards produced, it sufficed, however, to ex- 

 hibit electricity under a very different aspect from 

 any thing which had gone before, and to bring into 

 view those peculiar modifications in its action which 

 Dr. Wollaston was the first to render a satisfactory 

 account of, by referring them to an increase of 

 quantity, accompanied with a diminution of intensity 

 in the supply afforded. The discovery had not 

 long been made public, and the instrument in 

 the hands of chemists and electricians, before it 

 was ascertained that the electric current, trans- 

 mitted by it through conducting liquids, produces 

 in them chemical decompositions. This capital dis- 

 covery appears to have been made, in the first 

 instance, by Messrs. Nicholson and Carlisle, who ob- 

 served the decomposition of water so produced. It 

 was speedily followed up by the still more important 

 one of Berzelius and Hisinger, who ascertained it as 

 a general law, that, in all the decompositions so 

 effected, the acids and oxygen become transferred to, 

 and accumulated around, the positive, and hydro-- 

 gen, metals, and alkalies round the negative, pole of a 

 Voltaic circuit; being transferred in an invisible, and, 

 as it were, a latent or torpid state, by the action of 

 the electric current, through considerable spaces, 

 and even through large quantities of water or other 

 liquids, again to re-appear with all their properties 

 at their appropriate resting-places. 



(375.) It was in this state of things that the subject 

 was taken up by Davy, who, seeing that the strongest 

 chemical affinities were thus readily subverted by 

 the decomposing action of the pile, conceived the 



