JOURNAL 



' OF 



NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, CHEMISTRY, 



AND 



THE ARTS. 



OCTOBER, 181 2o 



ARTICLE I. 



On ihe Electric Column, and Aerial Electroscope. By}. A, 

 De Luc, Esq. F. R. S. 



To JVilliam Nicholson, Esq. 

 Sir, 

 I. TJ N my last paper, publlsbed in your No. 149, ^^^^^ ^'^v- 

 JjL ing shown, that Dr, Maycock had very ably refuted 

 the natural philosophers, who thought that the galvanic effects 

 depended on the electrical energies of the particles of inatter j 

 and proved, that it was produced by the action, on each other, 

 of two proper ??7e/«/5; I was obliged to dissent from him on Two points en 

 two points : 1. that the electrical excitation produced by the tv/o which the au- 

 metals did not exist during their contact, but only at the instant ^-^.^jj^ Dp' j^j^« 

 they were separated — 2. that the galvanic apparatus can only cock, 

 be excited by a decomposable jiuid, which is always decomposed 

 when the apparatus acts. But I opposed to these two proposi-His reasons 

 tions my experiments related in your Journal for June and Au- ^^'' *'*'^* 

 gust, 1810, which demonstrate, that, in the galvanic pile the 

 cke7Jiical effects are independent of the cause of the electric 

 effects ; the former being only produced when the electric fluid 

 pervades zpile, in which a liquid acts on the metals to corrode 

 them. I have explained, also, in the same paper, how these 

 Vol. XXXIII, No. 152.— Octobek, 1812. G ex- 



