112 Mr. H. Wilde's Experimental Researches 



made to develope themselves at the will of the experimenter, 

 either suddenly, by explosion, or gradually, in the form of the 

 oxyhydrogen-name. 



214. As the electrolytic products, as we have seen, are only 

 manifested and obtained at the point where the generating or 

 conducting aqueous circuit is interrupted by an electrode, just 

 as the spark only occurs at the point of interruption of the me- 

 tallic circuit in air, so a theory framed upon the supposition 

 that the transmission of an electric current through a closed 

 metallic circuit depends upon a succession of invisible sparks 

 following each other through the solid portions of the conductor, 

 might be supported with the same amount of plausibility as an 

 hypothesis based upon the assumption that the propagation of 

 an electric current through a closed aqueous circuit (212), or 

 through the homogeneous portions of a liquid, after the current 

 leaves the electrode, is dependent upon a series of imperceptible 

 decompositions and recompositions of the whole of the electro- 

 lyte traversed by the current. 



215. That the evolution of electrolytic oxygen and hydrogen 

 from water is an operation of transmutation^ and not one of de- 

 composition, was further shown by the converse experiment of 

 the reconversion of oxygen or hydrogen alone into water. The 

 strip of platinum terminating the conductor H (197) was intro- 

 duced into an inverted test-tube 4J inches long and ^ an inch 

 internal diameter, the upper half of which was tilled with hydro- 

 gen and the lower half with acidulated water. The lower end 

 of the tube was then immersed in the pool of acidulated water 

 (199); and the platinum electrode, exposed to the hydrogen and 

 water in the tube, was made positive, by placing the conductor 

 H in permanent connexion with the platinum terminal of a single 

 cell of the nitric-acid battery ; while the zinc terminal of the 

 same cell was connected with the conductor extended in the 

 canal. 



216. After connexion between the battery- cell and the elec- 

 trode in contact with the hydrogen and water in the pool had 

 been maintained for about five hours, the water had risen in the 

 tube one inch and a half, thereby indicating the transmutation 

 of a corresponding volume of hydrogen into water. 



217. On substituting an equal volume of oxygen for the hy- 

 drogen in the tube, and making the platinum electrode negative 

 by a much more feeble current than that used in the preceding 

 experiment, the water completely filled the tube in about thirty 

 hours, thereby indicating the transmutation of the whole of the 

 oxygen into water. 



218. From these experiments we may justly infer that if a 



