nish to liquefy, but then the Indian ink stood. For further precaution, an exact copy of the gauge was taken on paper, to be applied on the outside of the condensing tube. In most cases, when the experiment was over, the pressure was removed from the interior of the apparatus, to ascertain whether the mercury in the gauge would return back to its first or starting-place.
For the application of cold to these tubes, a bath of Thilorier's mixture of solid carbonic acid and ether was used. An earthenware dish of the capacity of 4 cubic inches or more was fitted into a similar dish somewhat larger, with three or four folds of dry flannel intervening, and then the bath mixture was made in the inner dish. Such a bath will easily continue for twenty or thirty minutes, retaining solid carbonic acid the whole time; and the glass tubes used would sustain sudden immersion in it without breaking.
But as my hopes of any success beyond that heretofore obtained depended more upon depression of temperature than on the pressure which I could employ in these tubes, I endeavoured to obtain a still greater degree of cold. There are, in fact, some results producible by cold which no pressure may be able to effect. Thus, solidification has not as yet been conferred on a fluid by any degree of pressure. Again, that beautiful condition which Cagniard de la Tour has made known, and which comes on with liquids at a certain heat, may have its point of temperature for some of the bodies to be experimented with, as oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, &c., below that belonging to the bath of carbonic acid and ether; and, in that case, no pressure which any apparatus could bear would be able to bring them into the liquid or solid state.
To procure this lower degree of cold, the bath of carbonic acid and ether was put into an air-pump, and the air and gaseous carbonic acid rapidly removed. In this way the temperature fell so low, that the vapour of carbonic acid given oil by the bath, instead of having a pressure of one atmosphere, had only a pressure of, 124 th of an atmosphere, or 1.2 inch of mercury; for the air-pump barometer could be kept at 28.2 inches when the ordinary barometer was at 29.4. At this low temperature the carbonic acid mixed with the ether was not more volatile than water at the temperature of 86°, or alcohol at ordinary temperatures.
