1178 The Galvanic Battery. [No. 108. 



these particles, and he has found, on evidence to which it is difficult to 

 refuse our assent, that no less than 800,000 charges of a Leyden Battery 

 consisting of fifteen large jars, charged by thirty turns of a powerful 

 Plate Electrical Machine in excellent order, are required to produce 

 electricity sufficient to decompose one single grain' of water into its 

 elementary constituents ! That the heat developed by the action of a 

 Battery, is due to the mutual electrical action of the particles of matter 

 thus highly charged, was originally suggested by Berzelius, the cele- 

 brated Swedish chemist, and of this idea Faraday, in the seventh series 

 of his researches, speaks with great commendation, but in the succeed- 

 ing series, he finds reason to modify his praise, and states that the heat 

 or light exhibit but a small portion of the electric power which acts, 

 and *' are merely incidental results, incomparably small in relation to 

 the forces concerned, and supplying no information of the way in which 

 the particles are active on each other, or in which their forces are final- 

 ly arranged. 



Such being therefore the state of doubt in which the immediate 

 cause of the development of heat by the Voltaic current is involved, I 

 do not dwell longer upon the point ; but I cannot close this section 

 without briefly adverting to the very beautiful and comprehensive theory 

 proposed by Faraday to explain the varied phenomena of conduction 

 and discharge, as well as many others to which, as being unconnected 

 with the subject of this paper, I do not allude. 



The division of bodies into conductors and non-conductors, or insula- 

 tors, is nearly contemporaneous with the origin of the science of electri- 

 city itself, and the states of conduction and insulation have in all 

 electrical theories been assumed as essentially different, although no 

 one has ever shewn in what their difference consists. By a series of 

 most beautiful experiments, Faraday has however shewn indisputably 

 that they are only extreme degrees of one common condition, and 

 that they consist in an action of the contiguous particles of matter de- 

 pendent on the forces developed by electrical excitements. The first ef- 

 fect of an excited body on other matter in its vicinity is, according to 

 Faraday's theory, the production among the particles of that matter of 

 a peculiar state of polarization, which constitutes induction. If this 

 inductive or polarised state continues undiminished, then perfect in- 

 sulation is the consequence. If, on the contrary, contiguous parti- 



