THE

BALTIMORE

Medical and Philosophical Lyceum.

VOL. I....No. II.

FOR APRIL, MAY AND JUNE.....1811.

The Bakerian Lecture for 1809.

On some new Electrochemical Researches on various Objects, particularly the metallic Bodies, from the Alkalies, and Earths, and on some Combinations of Hydrogen.

BY HUMPHREY DAVY, Esq. Sec. R. s. F. R. s. E. M. R. I. A. From the Philosophical Magazine.

1. Introduction.

I HAVE employed no inconsiderable portion of the time that has elapsed, since the last session of the Royal Society, in pursuing the train of experimental inquiries on the application of Electricity to Chemistry, the commencement and progress of which this learned body has done me the honour to publish in their Transactions.

In this communication I shall, as formerly, state the results. I hope they will be found to lead to some views, and applications, not unconnected with the objects of the Bakerian Lecture and though many of them are far from having attained that precision, and distinctness, which I could wish, yet still I flatter myself, that they will afford elucidations of some important and abstruse departments of chemistry, and tend to assist the progress of philosophical truth.

II. Some new Experiments on the Metals from the

fixed Alkalies.

In the paper in which I first made known potassium and sodium to the Royal Society, I ventured to consider these bodies according to the present state of our knowledge, as undecompounded, and potash and soda as metallic oxides, capable of being decomposed and recomposed, like other bodies of this class, and with similar phenomena.

Since that time, various repetitions of the most obvious of the experiments on this subject have been made in different parts of Europe. The generality of enlightened chemists have expressed themselves satisfied both with the experiments, and the conclusions drawn from them: but as usually happens in a state of activity in science, and when the objects of enquiry are new, and removed from the common order of facts, some inquirers have given hypothetical explanations of the phenomena, different from those I adopted.

M. M. Gay Lussac and Thenard, as I have mentioned on a former occasion, suppose potassium and sodium to be compounds of potash and soda with hydrogen ; a similar opinion seems to be entertained by M. Ritter. M. Curaudau* affects to consider them as combinations of charcoal, or of charcoal and hydrogen, with the alkalies; and an Inquirert in our own country regards them as composed of oxygen and hydrogen.

I shall examine such of those notions only as have been connected with experiments, and I shall not occupy the time of the society with any criticisms on matters of mere speculation.

In my two last communications, I have given an account of various experiments on the action of potassium upon ammonia, the process from which M. M. Gay Lussac and Thenard derive their inferences. At the time that these papers were written, I had seen no other account of the ex* Journal de Physique, June 1808. Nicholson's Journal, August 1809, p. 258.