188 Faraday as a Discoverer. : 
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vs 
to the vagueness of De la Rive; but the fact is that both he 
He had always some great object of research in view, butit 
the pursuit of it, he frequently alighted on facts of collate 
interest, to examine which he sometimes turned aside from hit 
direct course. Thus we find the series of his researches 0 
electro-chemical decomposition interrupted by an inquiry into : 
“the power of metals and other solids, to induce the combitt 
_ __ tion of gaseous bodies.” This inquiry, which was received by 
the Royal Society on the 30th of November, 1833, though mot 
80 important as those which precede and follow it, seis 
throughout his strength as an experimenter. The power” 
spongy platinum to cause the combination of oxygen and by 
hy 
drogen had been discovered by Débereiner in 1823, and had | 
been applied by him in the construction of his well-known py 
losophic lamp. It was shown subsequently by Dulong a 
Thenard that even a platinum wire, when perfectly ¢ ee 
oe be raised to incandescence by its action on @ jet 
ogen., araday ; 
In his experiments on the decomposition of water, F he 
found that the positive platinum plate of the decomposits 
possessed in an extraordinary degree, the power of ca : 
“Sle traced the of the 
the perfect cleanness of the positive plate. Against twee 
erated oxygen, which with the powerful affinity of the , a ; 
smaller, and they rise in much more rapid succession viet 
m the other. Knowing that oxygen is sixteen pet . 
than hydrogen, I have more than once concluded, ea ga 
led others into the error of concluding, that the 8? ter gos 
more quickly rising bubbles must belong to the ; yself the 
The thing appeared so obvious that I did not give peas pare 
trouble o: aking at the battery, which would at 0 a be a 
told me the nature of the gas. But Faraday woul 4 
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