her husband entered the Roman Catholic church, and in the following year Lady Georgiana Fullerton published her first novel, Ellen Middleton, which attracted W. E. Gladstone’s attention in the English Review. In 1846 she entered the Roman Catholic church. The death of her only son in 1854 plunged her in grief, and she continued to wear mourning until the end of her life. In 1856 she became one of the third order of St Francis, and thenceforward devoted herself to charitable work. In conjunction with Miss Taylor she founded the religious community known as “The Poor Servants of the Mother of God Incarnate,” and she also took an active part in bringing to England the sisters of St Vincent of Paul. Her philanthropic work is described in Mrs Augustus Craven’s work Lady Georgiana Fullerton, sa vie et ses œuvres (Paris, 1888), which was translated into English by Henry James Coleridge. She died at Bournemouth on the 19th of January 1885. Among her other novels were Grantley Manor (1847), Lady Bird (1852), and Too Strange not to be True (1864).
FULMAR, from the Gaelic Fulmaire, the Fulmarus glacialis of
modern ornithologists, one of the largest of the petrels (Procellariidae)
of the northern hemisphere, being about the size of the
common gull (Larus canus) and not unlike it in general coloration,
except that its primaries are grey instead of black. This bird,
which ranges over the North Atlantic, is seldom seen on the
European side below lat. 53° N., but on the American side comes
habitually to lat. 45° or even lower. In the Pacific it is represented
by a scarcely separable form, F. glupischa. It has been commonly
believed to have two breeding-places in the British Islands,
namely, St Kilda and South Barra; but, according to Robert
Gray (Birds of the West of Scotland, p. 499), it has abandoned
the latter since 1844, though still breeding in Skye. Northward
it established itself about 1838 on Myggenaes Holm, one of the
Faeroes, while it has several stations off the coast of Iceland and
Spitsbergen, as well as at Bear Island. Its range towards the
pole seems to be only bounded by open water, and it is the constant
attendant upon all who are employed in the whale and
seal fisheries, showing the greatest boldness in approaching boats
and ships, and feeding on the offal obtained from them. By
British seamen it is commonly called the “molly mawk”[1]
(corrupted from Mallemuck), and is extremely well known to them,
its flight, as it skims over the waves, first with a few beats of
the wings and then gliding for a long way, being very peculiar.
It only visits the land to deposit its single white egg, which is
laid on a rocky ledge, where a shallow nest is made in the turf
and lined with a little dried grass. Many of its breeding-places
are a most valuable property to those who live near them and
take the eggs and young, which, from the nature of the locality,
are only to be had at a hazardous risk of life. In St Kilda a
large number of the young are killed in one week of August, the
only time when, by the custom of the community, they are
allowed to be taken. These, after the oil is extracted from them,
serve the islanders with food for the winter. The oil has been
chemically analysed and found to be a fish-oil, and to possess
nearly all the qualities of that obtained from the liver of the cod,
with a lighter specific gravity. It, however, has an extremely
strong scent, which is said by those who have visited St Kilda
to pervade every thing and person on the island, and is certainly
retained by an egg or skin of the bird for many years. Whenever
a live example is seized in the hand it ejects a considerable
quantity of this oil from its mouth.
FULMINIC ACID, HCNO or H2C2N2O2, an organic acid
isomeric with cyanic and cyanuric acids; its salts, termed
fulminates, are very explosive and are much employed as detonators.
The free acid, which is obtained by treating the salts
with acids, is an oily liquid smelling like prussic acid; it is very
explosive, and the vapour is poisonous to about the same degree
as that of prussic acid. The first fulminate prepared was the
“fulminating silver” of L. G. Brugnatelli, who found in 1798
that if silver be dissolved in nitric acid and the solution added
to spirits of wine, a white, highly explosive powder was obtained.
This substance is to be distinguished from the black “fulminating
silver” obtained by C. L. Berthollet in 1788 by acting with
ammonia on precipitated silver oxide. The next salt to be
obtained was the mercuric salt, which was prepared in 1799 by
Edward Charles Howard, who substituted mercury for silver in
Brugnatelli’s process. A similar method is that of J. von Liebig
(1823), who heated a mixture of alcohol, nitric acid and mercuric
nitrate; the salt is largely manufactured by processes closely
resembling the last. A laboratory method is to mix solutions
of sodium nitromethane, CH2 : NO(ONa), and mercuric chloride,
a yellow basic salt being formed at the same time. Mercuric
fulminate is less explosive than the silver salt, and forms white
needles (with 12H2O) which are tolerably soluble in water. The
use of mercuric fulminate as a detonator dates from about 1814,
when the explosive cap was invented. It is still the commonest
detonator, but it is now usually mixed with other substances;
the British service uses for percussion caps 6 parts of fulminate,
6 of potassium chlorate and 4 of antimony sulphide, and for
time fuses 4 parts of fulminate, 6 of potassium chlorate and 4
of antimony sulphide, the mixture being damped with a shellac
varnish; for use in blasting, a home office order of 1897 prescribes
a mixture of 4 parts of fulminate and 1 of potassium chlorate.
In 1900 Bielefeldt found that a fulminate placed on top of an
aromatic nitro compound, such as trinitrotoluene, formed a
useful detonator; this discovery has been especially taken
advantage of in Germany, in which country detonators of this
nature are being largely employed. Tetranitromethylaniline
(tetryl) has also been employed (Brit. Pat. 13340 of 1905).
It has been proposed to replace fulminate by silver azoimide
(Wöhler & Matter, Brit. Pat. 4468 of 1908), and by lead azoimide
(Hyronimus, Brit. Pat. 1819 of 1908).
The constitution of fulminic acid has been investigated by many experimenters, but apparently without definitive results. The researches of Liebig (1823), Liebig and Gay-Lussac (1824), and of Liebig again in 1838 showed the acid to be isomeric with cyanic acid, and probably (HCNO)2, since it gave mixed and acid salts. Kekulé, in 1858, concluded that it was nitroacetonitrile, NO2·CH2·CN, a view opposed by Steiner (1883), E. Divers and M. Kawakita (1884), R. Scholl (1890), and by J. U. Nef (1894), who proposed the formulae:
| C : N·OH | O |
N : CH | CH : N·O | C : N·OH. |
| C.. : N·OH, | N : Ċ·OH, | ĊH : N·O, | ||
| Steiner, | Divers, | Scholl, | Nef. | |
The formulae of Kekulé, Divers and Armstrong have been discarded, and it remains to be shown whether Nef’s carbonyloxime formula (or the bimolecular formula of Steiner) or Scholl’s glyoxime peroxide formula is correct. There is some doubt as to the molecular formula of fulminic acid. The existence of double salts, and the observations of L. Wöhler and K. Theodorovits (Ber., 1905, 38, p. 345), that only compounds containing two carbon atoms yielded fulminates, points to (HCNO)2; on the other hand, Wöhler (loc. cit. p. 1351) found that cryoscopic and electric conductivity measurements showed sodium fulminate to be NaCNO. Nef based his formula, which involves bivalent carbon, on many reactions; in particular, that silver fulminate with hydrochloric acid gave salts of formylchloridoxime, which with water gave hydroxylamine and formic acid, thus
C:NO OAg →HC  |
NOAg | →HC |
N·OH | → H·CO2H + H2N·OH, |
| Cl | OH |
and also on the production from sodium nitromethane and mercuric chloride, thus CH2 : NO·Ohg → H2O + C : NOhg(hg = 12Hg). H. Wieland and F. C. Palazzo (1907) support this formula, finding that methyl nitrolic acid, NO2·CH : N·OH, yielded under certain conditions fulminic acid, and vice versa (Palazzo, 1907). M. Z. Jowitschitsch (Ann., 1906, 347, p. 233) inclines to Scholl’s formula; he found that the synthetic silver salt of glyoxime peroxide resembled silver fulminate in yielding hydroxylamine with hydrochloric acid, but differed in being less explosive, and in being soluble in nitric acid. H. Wieland and his collaborators regard “glyoxime peroxide” as an oxide of furazane (q.v.), and have shown that a close relationship exists between the nitrile oxides, furoxane, and fulminic acid (see Ann. Rep., London Chem. Soc., 1909, p. 84). Fulminuric acid, (HCNO)3, obtained by Liebig by boiling mercuric fulminate with water, was synthesized in 1905 by C. Ulpiani and L. Bernardini (Gazetta, iii. 35, p. 7), who regard it as NO2·CH(CN)·CO·NH2. It deflagrates at 145°, and forms a characteristic cuprammonium salt.
The early history of mercuric fulminate and a critical account of its application as a detonator is given in The Rise and Progress of the British Explosives Industry (International Congress of Applied Chemistry, 1909). The manufacture and modern aspects are treated in Oscar Guttmann, The Manufacture of Explosives, and Manufacture of Explosives, Twenty Years’ Progress (1909).
- ↑ A name misapplied in the southern hemisphere to Diomedea melanophrys, one of the albatrosses.
