Page:Experimental researches in electricity.djvu/129

Rh advances, but is accelerated by the evolution of heat, which is known by experiment to facilitate the combination in proportion to its intensity, and the temperature is thus gradually exalted until ignition results.

367. The dissipation of the vapour produced at the surface of the platina, and the contact of fresh oxygen and hydrogen with the metal, form no difficulty in this explication. The platina is not considered as causing the combination of any particles with itself, but only associating them closely around it; and the compressed particles are as free to move from the platina, being replaced by other particles, as a portion of dense air upon the surface of the globe, or at the bottom of a deep mine, is free to move by the slightest impulse, into the upper and rarer parts of the atmosphere.

368. It can hardly be necessary to give any reasons why platina does not show this effect under ordinary circumstances. It is then not sufficiently clean (353), and the gases are prevented from touching it, and suffering that degree of effect which is needful to commence their combination at common temperatures, and which they can only experience at its surface. In fact, the very power which causes the combination of oxygen and hydrogen, is competent, under the usual casual exposure of platina, to condense extraneous matters upon its surface, which soiling it, take away for the time its power of combining oxygen and hydrogen, by preventing their contact with it (334).

369. Clean platina, by which I mean such as has been made the positive pole of a pile (306), or has been treated with acid (341), and has then been put into distilled water for twelve or fifteen minutes, has a peculiar friction when one piece is rubbed against another. It wets freely with pure water, even after it has been shaken and dried by the heat of a spirit-lamp; and if made the pole of a voltaic pile in a dilute acid, it evolves minute bubbles from every part of its surface. But platina in its common state wants that peculiar friction: it will not wet freely with water as the clean platina does; and when made the positive pole of a pile, it for a time gives off large bubbles which seem to cling or adhere to the metal, and are evolved at distinct and separate points of the surface. These appearances and effects, as well as its want of power on oxygen and hydrogen, are the consequences, and the indications, of a soiled surface.

370. I found also that platina plates which had been cleaned perfectly soon became soiled by mere exposure to the air; for