Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/129

Rh phenomenon, I considered it as something very extraordinary; but as a property that was peculiar to air that was extracted from these substances and adventitious; and I always spoke of the air to my acquaintance as being substantially the same thing with common air. I particularly remember my telling Dr. Price that I was myself perfectly satisfied of its being common air, as it appeared to be so by the test of nitrous air; though, for the satisfaction of others, I wanted a mouse to make the proof quite complete.

On the 8th of this month I procured a mouse and put it into a glass vessel containing two ounce-measures of the air from mereurhts calcinatus. Had it been common air a full-grown mouse, as this was, would have lived in it about a quarter of an hour. In this air, however, my mouse lived a full half hour, and though it was taken out seemingly dead, it appeared to have been only exceedingly chilled; for, upon being held to the fire, it presently revived and appeared not to have received any harm from the experiment.

By this I was confirmed in my conclusion that the air extracted from mercurius calcinatus, etc., was at least as good as common air; but I did not certainly conclude that it was any better; because, though one mouse would live only a quarter of an hour in a given quantity of air, I knew it was not impossible but that another mouse might have lived in it half an hour, so little accuracy is there in this method of ascertaining the goodness of air: and. indeed, I have never had recourse to it for my own satisfaction since the discovery of that most ready, accurate and elegant test that nitrous air furnishes. But in this case I had a view to publishing the most generally-satisfactory account of my experiments that the nature of the thing would admit of.

This experiment with the mouse, when I had reflected upon it some time, gave me so much suspicion that the air into which I had put it was better than common air, that I was induced, the day after, to apply the test of nitrous air to a small part of that very quantity of air which the mouse had breathed so long; so that, had it been common air, I was satisfied it must have been very nearly, if not altogether, as noxious as possible, so as not to be affected by nitrous air; when, to my surprize again, I found that though it had been breathed so long it was still better than common air. For after mixing it with nitrous air, in the usual proportion of two to one, it was diminished in the proportion of 4 to 3; that is, the nitrous air had made it two ninths less than before, and this in a very short space of time: whereas I had never found that in the longest time any common air was reduced more than one fifth of its bulk by any proportion of nitrous air, nor more than one fourth by any phlogistic process whatever. Thinking of this extraordinary fact upon my pillow, the next morning I put another measure of nitrous air to the same mixture, and, to my utter