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precisely the reasons why the investigation is brought to a degree of simplicity, which is not surpassed in any branch of natural philosophy, and is altogether adapted to secure incontrovertibly to mathematics the possession of a new field of physics, from which it had hitherto remained almost totally excluded.

Fluid Portions of a Circuit introduce Chemical Changes which complicate the Consideration.—The chemical changes which so frequently occur in some—generally fluid—portions of a galvanic circuit, deprive the result of much of its natural simplicity, and by the complications they produce, conceal to a considerable extent the peculiar progression of the phenomenon; they cause an unexampled change of the phenomenon which gives rise to many apparent exceptions to the rule, frequently amounting even to contradictions, in so far as the sense of this word is itself not in contradiction to nature.