Page:Experimental researches in electricity.djvu/225

Rh and often failed, the breaking spark, however, continuing very constant and bright. When a little water was put over the mercury, the spark was greatly diminished in brilliancy, but very regular both on making and breaking contact. When the contact was made between clean platina, the spark was also very small, but regular both ways. The true electric spark is, in fact, very small, and when surfaces of mercury are used, it is the combustion of the metal which produces the greater part of the light. The circumstances connected with the burning of the mercury are most favourable on breaking contact; for the act of separation exposes clean surfaces of metal, whereas, on making contact, a thin film of oxide, or soiling matter, often interferes. Hence the origin of the general opinion that it is only when the contact is broken that the spark passes.

694. With reference to the other set of cases, namely, those of local action (682) in which chemical affinity being exerted causes no transference of the power to a distance where no electric current is produced, it is evident that forces of the most intense kind must be active, and in some way balanced in their activity, during such combinations; these forces being directed so immediately and exclusively towards each other, that no signs of the powerful electric current they can produce become apparent, although the same final state of things is obtained as if that current had passed. It was Berzelius, I believe, who considered the heat and light evolved in cases of combustion as the consequences of this mode of exertion of the electric powers of the combining particles. But it will require a much more exact and extensive knowledge of the nature of electricity, and the manner in which it is associated with the atoms of matter, before we can understand accurately the action of this power in thus causing their union, or comprehend the nature of the great difference which it presents in the two modes of action just distinguished. We may imagine, but such imaginations must for the time be classed with the great mass of doubtful knowledge (611) which we ought rather to strive to diminish than to increase; for the very extensive contradictions of this knowledge by itself shows that but a small portion of it can ultimately prove true.

695. Of the two modes of action in which chemical affinity is exerted, it is important to remark, that that which produces the electric current is as definite as that which causes ordinary chemical combination; so that in examining the production or