LORD BROUGHAM’S APPENDIX. 4738 
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 i 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 forementioned 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 
