Page:Experimental researches in chemistry and.djvu/434

1857.] or four days from a fluid which, prior to this operation, would not have deposited them in an equal degree for weeks. In the case of the ruby fluids the colour often became more rosy and luminous, and by reflected light the fluid seemed to have become more turbid, as if the particles had gained in reflective power; in fact the boiling often appeared to confer a sort of permanency on the particles in their new state. When settled, they formed collections looking like little lenses of a deep ruby or violet colour, at the bottom of the flasks containing the fluid; when all was shaken up the original fluid was reproduced, and then, by rest, the gold re-settled. This effect could be obtained repeatedly. The particles could fall together within a certain limit, but many weeks did not bring them nearer or into contact; for they remained free to be diffused by agitation. The space they occupied in this lens-like form must have been a hundredfold or even a thousandfold, more than that, which they would have filled as solid gold. Whether the particles be considered as mutually repulsive, or else as molecules of gold with associated envelopes of water, they evidently differ in their physical condition, for the time, from those particles which by the application of salt or other substances are rendered mutually adhesive, and so fall and clot together.

In preparing some of these fluids, I made the solution of gold hot and boiling before adding the solution of phosphorus. The phenomena were the same in kind as before: but when the phosphorus was dissolved in sulphide of carbon, the gold soon fell as a dark flocculent deposit; when it was dissolved in ether a more permanent turbid ruby fluid was obtained, which, if it does notgoon changing in aggregation, may give a good ruby deposit.

The particles in these fluids are remarkable for a set of physical alterations occasioned by bodies in small quantities, which do not act chemically on the gold, or change its intrinsic nature; for through all of them it seems to remain gold in a fine state of division. They occur most readily where the particles are finest, i. e. in the ruby fluids, and so readily that it is difficult to avoid them; they are often occasioned by the contact of vessels which are supposed to be perfectly clean. An idea of their nature may be obtained in the following manner. Place a layer of ruby fluid in a clean white plate, dip the tip of a glass rod in a solution of common salt and touch the ruby