52 LETTEES OF BEEZELIUS 



but the restoration of electrical equilibrium on a 

 large scale, it seems to me to be certain that the 

 smell or pungent vapour observed after a flash of 

 lightning is nothing but my ozone. At any rate it 

 must form an important constituent of the odor- 

 iferous body which is so produced. My investigations 

 have shown that ozone is not produced either in pure 

 oxygen or carbonic acid under conditions of tempera- 

 ture in which it is produced quite easily in atmos- 

 pheric air ; and I have also found that in air which 

 is' completely dried with calcium chloride, my test 

 paper is coloured perceptibly blue, after this an- 

 hydrous air has been allowed to stand for some time 

 with phosphorus. Now this experiment seems to 

 show that water also contributes nothing to the 

 formation of ozone. 1 But if so, there is no known 

 constituent of the atmosphere left from which the 

 ozone could possibly originate, except nitrogen. 

 Though it is a very remarkable fact that ozone 

 should be produced by the electrolysis of water, and 

 also by the discharge of electricity in the air, yet it 

 is still more extraordinary that so eminently electro- 

 negative a body as this can be formed in the presence 

 of phosphorus and even by its means. Indeed if a 

 small piece of phosphorus is placed in a flask contain- 

 ing ozonized oxygen collected at the positive pole of 

 a battery, the ozone smell, the bleaching power, the 



1 This remark is particularly interesting, because it is dia- 

 metrically opposed to his later view, which prevented him for 

 such a long time from accepting Marignac's explanation of the 

 nature of ozone, and de la Hive's proof that ozone can be 

 formed in the absence of water. 



