Count de Bouvlijo^ on the Laumonile. 89 



nite had not exhibited to me any sensible difference with respect to 

 Its specific gravity, whether this was taken whilst this substance had 

 experienced only a very slight change, or whether when it was much 

 more considerably altered. This fact which I did not expect, attri- 

 buting, according to the opinion generally entertained, its disinte- 

 gration or efflorescence to the loss of its water either of composition 

 and consequently combined with it, or of crystallisation, and in that 

 case simply interposed between its particles, this fact, I say, greatly 

 surprised me. But is it true that in the laumonite, as well as in all 

 the salts which effloresce on exposure to the atmosphere, this phe- 

 nomenon is to be attributed to the loss of water ? as far as the lau- 

 monite is concerned it appears to me very probable that this destruc- 

 tion is in reality, as 1 have said, nothing more than the simple result 

 of disintegration. That this is the case will appear from the changes 

 which occur in this mineral, and principally from the greater or less 

 regularity of the primitive form which many of the smallest fragments 

 preserve, when this alteration has even arrived at such a point that the 

 substance divides of itself. If it is to be attributed to the loss of its 

 water, this can only be the case with respect to that of crystallisation 

 or of simple interposition. But if so, ought not this substance, as 

 happens with regard to hydrophanous bodies, at some period during 

 the loss of its water to have, in consequence of the same affinity 

 which placed it there originally, a great tendency to resume it, and 

 thereby, re-establishing the refractive power which belongs to it in its 

 unaltered state, to recover its transparency, which it never does ? may 

 not its alteration rather be occasioned by a strong attraction of its 

 integrant molecules for caloric, and by the separation produced be- 

 tween them from the introduction of this fluid in larger quantity ? I 

 do not mean this as an assertion, but propose it simply as a question. 



M 



