Page:The chemical history of a candle.djvu/209

Rh experience—his bad experience. He knows very well that if he takes a piece of platinum-foil, and heats a piece of lead upon it, or if he takes a piece of platinum-foil, such as we have here, and heats things upon it that have lead in them, his platinum is destroyed. I have here a piece of platinum, and if I apply the heat of the spirit-lamp to it, in consequence of the presence of this little piece of lead which I will place on it, I shall make a hole in the metal. The heat of the lamp itself would do no harm to the platinum, nor would other chemical means; but because there is a little lead present, and there is an affinity between the two substances, the bodies fuse together at once. You see the hole I have made. It is large enough to put your finger in, though the platinum itself was, as you saw, almost infusible, except by the voltaic battery. For the purpose of shewing this fact in a more striking manner, I have taken pieces of platinum-foil, tin-foil, and lead-foil, and rolled them together; and if I apply the blowpipe to them, you will have, in fact, a repetition on a larger scale of the experiment you saw just now when the lead and platinum came together, and one