96 Report on M. Belangers Collections. 



numerous collections of drawings relative to the Natural 

 History of India, that have as yet been published on the 

 Fauna of this vast country. 



Faraday s Experimental Researches in Electricity.''^ By 

 Lieut. R. B. Smith, Bengal Engineers. 



[Fifth Series.] 



In the year 1800 it was discovered by Messrs. Carlisle 

 and Nicholson, that the voltaic battery had the power of 

 resolving water into its constituent elements. This obser- 

 vation has justly been considered the foundation stone of 

 electro-chemical science ; for no sooner it was made, than 

 numerous other bodies were subjected to the decomposing 

 influence of the battery ; their relations to it ascertained, 

 the laws regulating decomposition determined, and a broad 

 basis of facts prepared on which a sound theory might ulti- 

 mately be founded. Happily for science, the subject of 

 electro-chemical decomposition early attracted the notice of 

 Humphrey Davy, and in his hands led to the series of 

 brilliant discoveries which insured for him such an unexam- 

 pled degree of scientific fame. By what seems to be a 

 natural consequence, efforts to explain the mode of ac- 

 tion by which the many new^ and sometimes paradoxical 

 results of decomposition were efltected, kept pace with the 

 accumulation of facts, and numerous theories were in conse- 

 quence proposed. These varied much from each other, 

 were often inconsistent with facts, and occasionally so with 

 themselves. Even in the case of Davy himself, there seems to 

 have been much obscurity in theoretical views, for although 

 he sometimes speaks in clear, distinct, and decided terms, 

 yet at other times he states his doctrines so vaguely, that as 

 Faraday remarks, probably a dozen precise schemes of 



Continued from vol. iii. p. S61. 



