ON A NEW BLOWPIPE ARRANGEMENT. V7 
which serves to hold a glass tube bearing a fine platinum wire for 
flame reactions. 
The lamp may be any one of the many varieties of paraffin or 
grease lamps having a tlat wick. In my own case I employ the 
lamp found in Letcher’s blowpipe outfit, using solid paraffin as 
fuel. On the extreme left just midway across the board is a brass 
plate 2” x 1” hard-soldered on to a universal joint. This forms a 
convenient support, when protected by a piece of asbestos miil- 
board, for charcoal pellets or cubes, as well as for plaster slabs and 
aluminium plates. An upright prism of porcelain is used for 
cupelling. On the right is embedded into the table a flat steel 
anvil and agate mortar. 
Such a blowpipe becomes a valuable adjunct to the laboratory 
~ equipment, and instead of the blowpipe being despised and con- 
signed to the drawer or box of odds and ends it finds a useful 
place on the working bench. With sucha piece of apparatus one 
can get a very clearly defined reduction or oxidation flame, and 
when the jet slopes down on to the wick at the proper angle it is 
easy to produce a flame four inches long and so steady that I have 
actually cupelled off a lead button as perfectly as it could have 
been done in the muffle. Such a thing is sometimes stated in 
books, but I never saw it accomplished until I actually did it 
myself with the apparatus I now describe. 
Using the flame colouration and a blue screen it is quite possible 
to see the potassium flame amid the abundance of sodium salts in 
urine. Conversely, the presence of sodium salts in potassium 
compounds may be recognised by using the green tinted screen. 
Altogether it is the most efficient and the most easily handled 
blowpipe arrangement I know of, and I made good use of it dur- 
ing my recent visit to the Broken Hill Silver-Lead mines. - With 
the steady flame obtained, Von Kobell’s reaction for bismuth 
compounds gives most brilliant results on a slab of plaster of 
Paris; and with dry thiosulphate all the reactions may be instantly 
obtained in the dry way, that are usually given in the wet way 
with sulphuretted hydrogen. 
‘L—August 3, 1892. 
