Page:Experimental researches in chemistry and.djvu/469

454 thermo-voltaic current, and appears in another; or when it enlarges or changes the state of bodies; or what would happen, if the heat being presented, such changes were purposely opposed. We have a right to ask these questions, but not to ignore or deny the conservation of force; and one of the highest uses of the principle is to suggest such inquiries. Explications of similar points are continually produced, and will be most abundant from the hands of those who, not desiring to ease their labour by forgetting the principle, are ready to admit it either tacitly, or better still, effectively, being then continually guided by it. Such philosophers believe that heat must do its equivalent of work; that if in doing work it seem to disappear, it is still producing its equivalent effect, though often in a manner partially or totally unknown; and that if it give rise to another form of force (as we imperfectly express it), that force is equivalent in power to the heat which has disappeared.

What is called chemical attraction, affords equally instructive and suggestive considerations in relation to the principle of the conservation of force. The indestructibility of individual matter is one case, and a most important one, of the conservation of chemical force. A molecule has been endowed with powers which give rise in it to various qualities, and these never change, either in their nature or amount. A particle of oxygen is ever a particle of oxygen—nothing can in the least wear it. If it enters into combination and disappears as oxygen, if it pass through a thousand combinations, animal, vegetable, mineral,—if it lie hid for a thousand years and then be evolved, it is oxygen with its first qualities, neither more nor less. It has all its original force, and only that; the amount of force which it disengaged when hiding itself, has again to be employed in a reverse direction when it is set at liberty; and ii; hereafter, we should decompose oxygen, and find it compounded of other particles, we should only increase the strength of the proof of the conservation of force, for we should have a right to say of these particles, long as they have been hidden, all that we could say of the oxygen itself.

Again, the body of facts included in the theory of definite proportions, Witnesses to the truth of the conservation of force; and though we know little of the cause of the change of properties of the acting and produced bodies, or how the forces of