Page:Experimental researches in electricity.djvu/226

200 evolution of electricity in cases of combination or decomposition, it will be necessary, not merely to observe certain effects dependent upon a current of electricity, but also their quantity: and though it may often happen that the forces concerned in any particular case of chemical action may be partly exerted in one mode and partly in the other, it is only those which are efficient in producing the current that have any relation to voltaic action. Thus, in the combination of oxygen and hydrogen to produce water, electric powers to a most enormous amount are for the time active (596, 608); but any mode of examining the flame which they form during energetic combination, which has as yet been devised, has given but the feeblest traces. These therefore may not, cannot, be taken as evidences of the nature of the action; but are merely incidental results, incomparably small in relation to the forces concerned, and supplying no information of the way in which the particles are active on each other, or in which their forces are finally arranged.

696. That such cases of chemical action produce no current of electricity, is perfectly consistent with what we know of the voltaic apparatus, in which it is essential that one of the combining elements shall form part of, or be in direct relation with, an electrolytic conductor (656, 658). That such cases produce no free electricity of tension, and that when they are converted into cases of voltaic action they produce a current in which the opposite forces are so equal as to neutralise each other, prove the equality of the forces in the opposed acting particles of matter, and therefore the equality of electric power in those quantities of matter which are called electro-chemical equivalents (559). Hence another proof of the definite nature of electro-chemical action (518, etc.), and that chemical affinity and electricity are forms of the same power (652, etc).

697. The direct reference of the effects produced by the voltaic pile at the place of experimental decomposition to the chemical affinities active at the place of excitation (626, 652), gives a very simple and natural view of the cause why the bodies (or ions) evolved pass in certain directions; for it is only when they pass in those directions that their forces can consist with and compensate (in direction at least) the superior forces which are dominant at the place where the action of the whole is determined. If, for instance, in a voltaic circuit, the activity of which is determined by the attraction of zinc for the oxygen of water, the zinc move from right to left, then any other cation included in the circuit, being part of an electrolyte, or forming