290 Dr. Hare’s Reply to Prof. Vanucem. 
may be exchanged for another, as easily, as mistaken—but 
supposing that the mistake originated with Dr. Macneven, 
it should be recollected that he did not act under the idea 
of any serious responsibility. He was writing to a friend, 
not controverting the conclusions of a skilful chemist. 
It was in January last that Dr. Macneven first operated 
with a deflagrator. I then sent him the first he ever had. 
Notwithstanding his well known accuracy, in cases where 
his opportunities of observation are duly great, it is not 
unaccountable that amid the hurry of his lectures and his 
practice. he should have mistaken a globule of iron for a 
specimen of fused carbon. But considering Professor Sil- 
liman’s great experience and skill asa mineralogist and 
chemist, and his having operated with the deflagrator for 
nearly a year before bis memoir on the fusion of charcoal 
was published, it ought not to have been so readily sup- 
posed, that in scrutinizing the substances which he had ob- 
tained, with a view to communicate the result to the public, 
any advantageous employment of the magnet, the hammer, 
the file, or the mineral acids had been omitted.* 
It is true. as Mr. Vanuxem observes, that the incinera- 
tion of charcoal proves it to contain impurities——but those 
impurities are well known to be earth or alkali, with a very 
minute portion of iron, ifany. ‘These facts, thus cited by 
him, are therefore irreconcilable with his inference, that a 
piece of charcoal of about one inch in length, and less than 
a quarter of an inch in thickness, could, instantaneously, at 
its point, form a projection of matter almost solely ferru- 
ginous. 
I will take this opportunity of observing, that the most 
* It appears frm Professor Silliman’s Memoir, (Vol. V. p. 363, Ameri- 
can Journal of Science,) that he did employ boiling sulphuric and boiling 
nitric acid; and moreover, it is evident that the products which he repre- 
sented as fused carbon, could not have been iron, both on account of their 
habitudes with these acids, and on account of their disappearance when 
subjected to the solar focus in oxygen gas. Ofcourse no ‘‘ advantageous” 
application of the magnet could have been made. In examining the glo- 
bules produced upon plumbago, when exposed to the deflagrator, it will be 
found that Professor Silliman did resort to the magnet. Iron being a con- 
stituent of plumbago, it was in that case rational to expect that the glo- 
bules might be magnetic. The magnet was also employed by him in test- 
ing the globules procured from anthracite, by means of the deflagrator. 
