300 Dr. Schafhaentl on the Different Species of 
out setting the remaining parts of the compound in perfect 
freedom, and enables them to replace the lost body by another 
chemical equivalent, or to allow their molecules to follow their 
own attractive tendency, and to form, after being set free, a 
new individual body for themselves. 
The action of bodies in their utmost molecular division is 
quite otherwise than when their molecules had been sufficient- 
ly moveable to follow, after separation, their own mutually at- 
tractive forces and to neutralize them in one centre. 
A body whose chemical force had been neutralized by an- 
other, now deprived of that neutralizing body, without having 
sufficient freedom of its molecules to follow their forces of 
mutual attraction set at once at liberty, is in the state of a body 
surrounded by an atmosphere of electricity and in a different 
relation and condition of tension to the surrounding bodies. 
This relation is visible in all bodies placed under such cir- 
cumstances in contact with others : the instance of the reduc- 
tion of iron at a low temperature by a current of hydrogen is 
well known ; the following fact seems less so. A lump of mal- 
leable, hammered, or rolled iron raised to a white heat, over 
, which water is poured, exerts a very feeble decomposing power 
on the water. Let us now take a similar mass of iron out of 
the puddling furnace, just ready to be placed under the ham- 
mer, and pour a basin of water upon it. No hissing noise is 
perceptible, no generation of steam visible*, and the water is 
at once decomposed, the flames of hydrogen enveloping the 
white-hot ball and rising very often to a height of four or five 
feet. I need scarcely remark, that the iron taken out of the 
puddling furnace is in the same state as iron treated with 
acids; a skeleton of each grain of cast iron remains, with this 
difference only ; that with iron treated with acid, electro-posi- 
tive metals are partially removed from the compound; but by 
treating cast iron in a puddling furnace, the relative electro- 
negative bodies are taken instead, without destroying the me- 
chanical texture. A few strokes of the hammer destroy this 
property of the white-hot iron. 
\Vhen a constituent of a decomposed body is separated 
from another, in a solid state, by chemical action, the so-sepa- 
rated body is never left in the same state as that in which it 
existed when forming a corresponding part of another body ; 
and each body set at once free by chemical action, with per- 
* On the subject of the subitaneous formation of steam by red-hot or white 
puddling slag, oxide of iron, and malleable iron, I mentioned some cu- 
rious instances in my paper “ On the conversion of water into steam at 
the higher degrees of temperature,” &c., in the Mechanics’ Magazine, vol. 
XXX. pp. 138, 294, and 339. 
