Page:Experimental researches in chemistry and.djvu/124

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1844.]
of Bodies generally existing as Gases.
109

the same time the part was filled with solid carbonic acid. It melts at the temperature of -70° or -72° Fahr., and the solid carbonic acid is heavier than the fluid bathing it. The solid or liquid carbonic acid at this temperature has a pressure of 5.33 atmospheres nearly. Hence it is easy to understand the readiness with which liquid carbonic acid, when allowed to escape into the air, exerting only a pressure of one atmosphere, freezes a part of itself by the evaporation of another part.

Thilorier gives -100° C. or -14.8° Fahr. as the temperature at which carbonic acid becomes solid. This however is rather the temperature to which solid carbonic acid can sink by further evaporation in the air, and is a temperature belonging to a pressure not only lower than that of 5.33 atmospheres, but even much below that of one atmosphere. This cooling effect to temperatures below the boiling-point often appears. A bath of carbonic acid and ether exposed to the air will cool a tube containing condensed solid carbonic acid, until the pressure within the tube is less than one atmosphere; yet, if the same bath be covered up so as to have the pressure of one atmosphere of carbonic acid vapour over it, then the temperature is such as to produce a pressure of 2.5 atmospheres by the vapour of the solid carbonic acid within the tube.

The estimates of the pressure of carbonic acid vapour are sadly at variance; thus, Thilorier[1] says it has a pressure of 26 atmospheres at -4° Fahr., whilst Addams[2] says that for that pressure it requires a temperature of 30°. Addams gives the pressure about 27½ atmospheres at 32°, but Thilorier and myself[3] give it as 36 atmospheres at the same temperature. At 50° Brunel[4] estimates the pressure as 60 atmospheres, whilst Addams makes it only 34-'67 atmospheres. At 86° Thilorier finds the pressure to be 73 atmospheres; at 4° more, or 90°, Brunel makes it 120 atmospheres; and at 10° more, or 100°, Addams makes it less than Thilorier at 86°, and only 62°32 atmospheres; even at 150° the pressure with him is not quite 100 atmospheres.

I am inclined to think that at about 90° Cagniard de la Tour's state comes on with carbonic acid. From Thilorier's data we may obtain the specific gravity of the liquid and the

  1. Ann de Chim. 1835, 11. 427, 432.
  2. Phil. Trans. 1823, p. 198
  3. Report of Brit. Assoc. 1838, p. 70.
  4. Royal Institution Journal, xxi. 132.