LORD BROUGHAM'S APPENDIX. 473 



manuscript Memoir, in the handwriting of Blagden, there is 

 only one communication of experiments alluded to : one com- 

 munication to Priestley. The experiments are there said to 

 have been made in 1781 ; but there is no mention of the date 

 of the communication. Nor are we informed whether the con- 

 clusions inferred from those experiments, and which, accord- 

 ing to Blagden, were communicated by him to Lavoisier in the 

 summer of 1783, were equally included in the communication 

 made to Priestley. This chemist, in his Memoir written before 

 the month of April, 1783, read in June of the same year, and 

 quoted by Cavendish, says nothing of the theory of the latter, 

 although he quotes experiments. 



Several propositions flow from the preceding facts : 



1. Cavendish, in the Memoir that was read to the Royal 

 Society the 15th of January, 1784, describes the capital ex- 

 periment of the combustion of the oxygen and hydrogen in 

 closed vessels, and cites water as the product of this combus- 

 tion ; 



2. In the same Memoir Cavendish deduces from these same 

 experiments that the two forenientioned gases are transformed 

 into water ; 



3. In an addition by Blagden, made with the consent of 

 Cavendish, the date of the summer of 1781 is assigned to the 

 experiments of the latter ; a communication to Priestley is 

 quoted, without specifying the epoch, without mentioning con- 

 clusions, without stating even when those conclusions occurred 

 to the mind of Cavendish. This must be regarded as a most 

 material omission ; 



4. In one of the additions made to the Memoir by Blag- 

 den, Cavendish's conclusion is related in the following words : 

 Oxygen gas is water deprived of its phlogiston. This addi- 

 tion is posterior to the arrival of Lavoisier's Memoir in Eng- 

 land. 



It may moreover be remarked, that in another edition to 

 Cavendish's Memoir, written by the hand of that chemist, and 

 which is certainly posterior to the arrival of Lavoisier's Me- 

 moir in England, Cavendish distinctly asserts for the first 



