COHESION OF WATER AND OF ALCOHOL. 
BY EDWIN MORRISON. 
At the meeting of the Iowa Academy of Sciences in 1904 
I read a paper descriptive of a new arrangement of a 
cohesion of water apparatus adapted to elementary labora- 
tory work. The ease of manipulation, and close agree- 
ment of results in ordinary laboratory work led me to the 
thought of testing the accuracy of the standards of cohesion 
of water as ordinarily given in text-books and manuals. 
To my surprise, after a careful search through a number of 
the best text-books, manuals and works containing physical 
tables and constants, I found but one result tabulated, that 
of Gay-Lussac. There may be two reasons why the above 
author’s data has been so universally accepted. First on 
account of the difficulties attending the use of the ordinary 
form of apparatus for finding the cohesion of a liquid. 
Second, the general feeling that the ‘Hid Master Experi- 
menters” left nothing undone or out of account in their 
experiments. 
I need not here give a detailed description of the appara- 
tus, as such a description appears in the 1904 proceedings 
of the Academy. In brief, the apparatus consists of a 
circular disk of glass cemented to the base of an accurately 
turned wooden cone, which has an eyelet screwed into the 
apex of the cone for suspension from one arm of a scale 
beam. The experiment consists in adding known weights 
to the scale pan opposite to the cone until the glass 
is separated from a vessel of water which is placed im- 
mediately under the disk — the disk having been previously 
pressed down until it was in contact with the water. If 
the disk when pulled away from the water is wet then we 
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