AND SCHONBEIN 99 



XXII 

 Schonbein to Berzelius 



DEAE SIR, 



I thank you sincerely for your kind and 

 interesting letter of the 13th inst. I have followed 

 the advice you were so good as to give me and have 

 sent a letter of thanks to His Majesty the King, as 

 well as to His Excellency the Foreign Secretary. 

 Permit me in this matter to express to you my sincere 

 thanks for having obtained for me by your good 

 offices so honourable a distinction. 



I can hardly assent to your and de la Rive's views 

 on the nature of ozone, although I readily admit and 

 have long been aware that they make it out to be 

 a substance of infinitely greater interest than it 

 appears according to my theory; for this reason I 

 wrote to de la Rive a short time ago : " For 

 ambition's sake I must wish that you and Berzelius 

 are in the right, and Mr. Schonbein in the wrong, 

 for ozone being mere oxygen modified by electricity, 

 would be a substance infinitely more interesting than 

 my peroxide of hydrogen." l My reasons for rejecting 

 your view are as follows: 1. Not a single fact is 

 known, which shows that any elementary body is 

 changed in any way whatever in its properties by 

 means of electricity. 2. On the other hand there are 

 a number of substances which by combining with 

 1 This sentence is in English in the original. Tr. 



