108 Dr. Harems Dejlagrator and Calorimotor. 



fionderable principles, producing the phenomena of heat 

 ight and electricity. The coexistence of these principles 

 in the medium around us, their simultaneous, or alternate 

 agency and appearance, during many of the most important 

 processes of nature, seem to me to sanction a conjecture, 

 that as ingredients in ponderable substances they may 

 cause those surprisingly active and wonderfully diversified 

 properties usually ascribed to apparently inadequate chan- 

 ges, in the proportions of ponderable elements. 



In obedience to your request, I have thus displayed the 

 ideas at present awakened in my mind by these obscure 

 and interesting phenomeRa. I am not willing to assume 

 any respousibiliiy for the correctness of my conjectures. 

 Possibly they may excite in you farther and more correct 

 speculations. 



Letter V. — From the Editor, to Prof. Robert Hare, M.D. 



Fusion of Charcoal, by the Dejlagrator, with proofs of 

 a current between the Poles. 



Yale College, New-Haven, May 1 0, 1 822. 



My Dear Sir, 



In your memoir on your Galvanic Deflagrator, (p. 110. 

 Vol. Ill, of this Journal,) when speaking of the ignition 

 produced by that instrument, in charcoal points, you re- 

 mark : " If the intensity of the light, did not produce an 

 optical deception, by its distressing influence upon the or- 

 gans of vision, the charcoal assumed a pasty consistence, as 

 if in a, state approaching to fusion. 



" That charcoal should be thus softened without being 

 destroyed by the oxygen of the atmosphere, will not appear 

 strange, when the power of galvanism in reversing chemical 

 affinities is remembered ; and were it otherwise the air 

 could have no access, first because of the excessive rarefac- 

 tion, and in the next place as I suspect on account of the vol- 

 atilization of the Carbon, forming about it a circumambient 

 atmosphere. This last mentioned impression arose from 

 observing, that when the experiment was performed in va- 

 cuo, there was a lively scintillation, as if the Carbon in an 



