1877 -] 
Notices of Books. 
275 
Chemical and Physical Researches. By Thomas Graham, D.C.L., 
F.R.S. Collected and printed, for private circulation only, 
by James Young, F.R.S. and Dr. Angus Smith, F.R.S. 
Edinburgh : 1877. 
It would have been difficult to offer more graceful evidence of 
friendship, and nothing would have touched and gratified Mr. 
Graham more, than the publication of this volume by his valued 
friends Mr. Young and Dr. Angus Smith. 
Mr. Graham’s work was peculiar, as his researches were mainly 
devoted to the elucidation of questions which occupy an inter- 
mediate position between chemistry and physics. Dr. Smith 
therefore wisely determined not to place the papers in strict 
chronological order, but to arrange them under three divisions, 
headed respectively “ Gases,” “ Salts and Solutions,” and 
“ Unclassified Papers.” The plan is a most fortunate one, for it 
well shows the gradual development of Mr. Graham’s thoughts 
in each division of his work, and at the same time it exhibits its 
strength and coherence. 
His earliest paper “ On the Absorption of Gases in Liquids,” 
published in 1826, is remarkable for ingenuity and close reasoning. 
In it he considers that “ gases may owe their absorption in liquids 
to their capability of being liquefied, and that when gases appear 
to be absorbed by liquids they are simply reduced to that liquid 
inelastic form which otherwise, by cold or pressure, they might 
be made to assume ; their detention in the absorbing liquid is 
owing to that mutual affinity between liquids which is so com- 
mon. Faraday had shown, in 1823, that in the physical states 
of gas, liquid and solid, there was nothing of absolute perma- 
nency, and that any body may assume consecutively all these 
forms.” Hence Mr. Graham concluded that those bodies which 
at the temperature of the atmosphere we experience to be gases, 
may be considered, without impropriety, as volatilised liquids, 
and he pointed out that it was not necessary that gaseous bodies 
— whose absorption in liquids he was explaining — should be 
presented to the liquids in a liquefied state, for the mere absorp- 
tion of such gases by liquids occasioned their liquefaction. He 
gives as an instance the liquefaction which must accom- 
pany the absorption of steam, at 6oo° F., by sulphuric acid 
heated to the same temperature, while in order to liquefy the 
gaseous body in the ordinary way it would be necessary to cool 
it down through a range of nearly 400 0 . The absorption is, in 
faCt, dependent upon “the affinity which occasions the miscibility 
of two liquids.” In his last paper in the “ Philosophical Trans- 
actions,” published more than forty years afterwards, he refers to 
the liquefaction of gases in colloids in much the same terms, for 
he alludes “to the general assumption of liquidity by gases when 
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