410 



sibility pass into the part of the apparatus where the spirit 

 is condensed. 



Dr. Apjohn proceeded to observe, that the potato spirit 

 oil, as it has been hitherto called, has of late attracted much of 

 the attention of chemists. Pelletan, from some rough expe- 

 riments upon it with acids, threw out the idea that it was 

 more analogous to alcohol than to the volatile oils, and this 

 opinion seems to have been in some measure adopted by 

 Dumas. More recently M. Auguste Cahours (Annales de 

 Chimie, January, 1839) has revived this opinion, and con- 

 cluded it to be one of the groups including alcohol, pyroxilic 

 spirit, and acetone. He represents it by the formula 

 Cio H12 o 2 = c ]0 h 10 + 2 h °> which obviously makes it quite 

 analogous to alcohol in composition. The carbo-hydrogen 

 c 10 h ]0 he has insulated, by distilling the oil from anhydrous 

 phosphoric acid. He calls it amilene, and finds the specific 

 gravity of its vapour to be 4.904, so that an atom of it gives 

 but one volume of vapour, — a circumstance in which, as Ca- 

 hours observes, it agrees with Dr. Kane's mesitylene, but 

 differs from the carbo-hydrogens c 4 h 4 and c 2 h 2 which occur 

 in alcohol and pyroxilic spirit. By acting upon potato spirit 

 oil, (or, as Cahours calls it, amilic alcohol,) with sulphuric 

 acid and chlorine, he obtained products corresponding per- 

 fectly with those -yielded by ordinary alcohol when similarly 

 treated. The amilic ether, or c 10 h 10 + ho, he did not suc- 

 ceed in insulating. 



Dr. Apjohn observed, in conclusion, that he had been 

 aware, for more than twelve months, of the identity of the 

 fluid oil which he had examined with the potato spirit oil of 

 the French chemists ; but having engaged in the examina- 

 tion of another oil, of the consistence of butter at ordinary 

 temperatures, which is well known to exist in corn spirit, it 

 was his intention, when he had completed his experiments 

 upon it, to give publicity to what he knew of both oils in the 

 same paper. In the mean time, however, Liebig and Pelouze 



