Miscellanies. ' 401 



nus. The erroneous printing occurs once on p. 32, it is correct on 

 pp. 90, 126, 128, and 129. It is the name of the author of the first 

 valuable treatise on irilobites, (Alexander Brongniart,) with a Latin 

 termination. A. Eaton. 



5. Caution addressed to manufacturers and venders of inflamma- 

 ble substances, especially if volatile. — We are told that in subliming 

 camphor, the vessel sometimes becomes slopped by the condensed va- 

 por, thus forming a solid plug, and that explosion, with a dangerous 

 combustion of the volatile vapor, occasionally happens. 



We knew a gentleman once to set fire to his family parlor,-by at- 

 tempting to distil ether in it, and we have known, by experience, what 

 it is to pass through a wide flame of ether kindled by a candle at a 

 considerable distance on the table of a lecture room. 



It is well known that the entire volume of the air, in a small room, 

 sometimes becomes inflammable in consequence of the diffusion 

 through it of etherial vapor, arising from open vessels from which it 

 was poured at the time. 



The obvious cautions are still more forcibly impressed by the fol- 

 lowing notice from the National Gazette, of an accident which oc- 

 curred in Philadelphia, and which occasioned " a severe loss to be 

 sustained by Mr. George W. Carpenter, the eminent chemist and 

 druggist of Market street. On the night of the 24th of September, 

 one of the young men of his store was agitating a bottle containing 

 two gallons of alcohol of thirty six degrees, in which were contained 

 gums and resins, for the purpose of making a tincture. By some 

 chance it communicated with a lamp on the counter, and the bottle 

 broke, throwing its contents over the counter and floor. In an in- 

 stant the whole was in a flame, rising to the ceiling and spreading to- 

 wards the side of the room. Unfortunately, a bottle containing spir- 

 its of turpentine saturated with camphor, which was at the end of the 

 counter, broke, from the heat, and added double fury to the element, 

 so that before water could be procured, the whole store was envel- 

 oped in flames, the bottles on both sides bursting and throwing their 

 inflammable contents into the fire. The loss sustained by Mr. Car- 

 penter amounts to ten thousand dollars, of which five thousand dol- 

 lars were insured. He has also to regret the destruction of a num- 

 ber of accounts, several years' letters, and other papers of value, as 

 well as various unpublished essays on Mineralogy and Medicine in- 

 tended for Professor Silliman's Journal and the American Journal of 

 Vol. XXIIL— No. 2. 61 



