On Certain New, Phenomena in Chemistry. 

 By Verplanck Colvin. 



[Read before the Institute, Jan. 2, 1872.] 



The subject of this paper is so broad and varied, the 

 phenomena so interwoven and connected with different 

 branches of material science, that the title is but a slight 

 index to its character, and the paper itself can be only a 

 brief statement of facts, with such deductions as may seem 

 to follow. It might have been entitled " An Account of 

 Mercury and its Amalgams". As that, however, is not 

 exactly the scope of the paper, nor the final object of it, but 

 only the means or vehicle of communicating some ideas — 

 which I hope will prove to be new — it may be allowed to 

 stand here as a suggestion as to the character of the matter 

 which is to follow. 



With the discovery, by Humphry Davy, of the metals of 

 the alkalies and earths, a new era opened in Chemistry. 

 The sombre clouds which non-experimenting theorists 

 had cast around the science were suddenly and violently 

 dissipated in the blaze of simple truth, and one of those 

 epochs occurred which must from time to time recur, as 

 man acquires mastery over matter. As the theories of 

 Stahl and his phlogiston, had been pressed down and 

 swept away by the discoveries of the previous century, so 

 the accumulated errors of the intervening age were over- 

 thrown by Davy's investigations, and the new metals were 

 evolved by electrolysis in the form of amalgams or com- 

 pounds with mercury. A few of the metals of the earths, 

 however, could not be thus procured, and their existence 

 was only rendered probable by the analogous action of 



