AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 591 



condition; in other words, it simply renders its specific heat, 

 i. e. its specific electricity, greater, while its "capacity,'' other 

 things equal, is less than the ratio of the increment of tempera- 

 ture, and the electricity becoming combined or specific, is thus 

 prevented from being sensible to' the electrometer any more than 

 the supposed latent heat is to the thermometer. 



It may not be altogether irrelevant to remark, that combined, 

 latent, integral, or specific electricity (these being equivalent 

 terms), never develops magnetic effects or polarity, as does 

 electricity, which we may properly term superficial (as distin- 

 guished from combined)^ whether static or dynamic, and vice 

 versa ^ magnetism produces electrical effects. Their separation 

 is in many respects but more confusing, although in every case 

 one or the other may be considered a primary, and the other a 

 secondary or induced condition, the magnetic or the electrical, 

 and their relative antecedence has a most important influence 

 normally upon the structure of all bodies, for, in case of the for- 

 mer, the body, as a whole, will be crystalline or fibrous, as wood, 

 ice, or asbestos, and in case of the latter, homogeneous in organiza- 

 tion, or what may be considered an aggregation of spheroidal 

 atoms, as oil, water or vapor, whether these atoms be solid or 

 vesicular, or the fibres in the other case be solid or tubular. 



Latent heat, combined electricity, is the cause of all expansion 

 in homogeneous bodies. Its conversion to that condition and their 

 expansion being always simultaneous and inseparable, and one 

 cannot occur without, the other. 



Steam, for instance, is a homogeneous body, and in its expan- 

 sion, the total amount of the dynamic effect it has exerted, whether 

 usefully realized or not, is exactly measured by the number of 

 degrees of temperature it has lost in so doing, for that is the mea- 

 sure of the amount of heat it has converted into the latent con- 

 dition, whether it be called in that condition heat or electricity. 



The same laws apply to gases as well as steam or other simple 

 vapors; in fact gases generally are but the vapors of some liquids 

 known or unknown to the chemist, but, that to exist in the liquid 

 form may or may not require the attendant conditions of greater 

 pressure and lesser temperature^ than those of the atmosphere, or 

 than any yet produced by art. 



Why electricity can become latent during the expansion of 

 bodies, whether solid or aeriform like steam, is as hard a question 

 to solve as why heat should become so under the same circum- 

 gtances, if we accept of the heat theory. It is quite possibte that 

 In either case, if it were practicable to separate and insulate a 



