Page:The fundamental laws of electrolytic conduction.djvu/40

 bichloride of tin, which passed away in fumes, and the tin evolved at the negative electrode Combined with the platina, forming an alloy, fusible at the temperature to which the tube was subjected, and therefore never occasioning metallic communication through the decomposing chloride. When the experiment had been continued so long as to yield a reasonable quantity of gas in the volta-electrometer, the battery connection was broken, the positive electrode removed, and the tube and remaining chloride allowed to cool. When cold, the tube was broken open, the rest of the chloride and the glass being easily separable from the platina wire and its button of alloy. The latter when washed was then reweighed, and the increase gave the weight of the tin reduced.

I will give the particular results of one experiment, in illustration of the mode adopted in this and others, the results of which I shall have occasion to quote. The negative electrode weighed at first 20 grains; after the experiment it, with its button of alloy, weighed 23.2 grains. The tin evolved by the electric current at the cathode weighed therefore 3.2 grains. The quantity of oxygen and hydrogen collected in the volta-electrometer = 3.85 cubic inches. As 100 cubic inches of oxygen and hydrogen, in the proportions to form water, may be considered as weighing 12.92 grains, the 3.85 cubic inches would weigh 0.49742 of a grain; that being, therefore, the weight of water decomposed by the same electric current as was able to decompose such weight of protochloride of tin as could yield 3.2 grains of metal. Now 0.49742:3.2::9 the equivalent of water is to 57.9, which should therefore be the equivalent of tin, if the experiment had been made without error, and if the electrochemical decomposition is in this case also definite. In some chemical works 58 is given as the chemical equivalent of tin, in others 57.9. Both are so near to the result of the experiment, and the experiment itself is so subject to slight causes of variation (as from the absorption of gas in the volta-electrometer), that the numbers leave little doubt of the applicability of the law of definite action in this and all similar cases of electro-decomposition.

It is not often I have obtained an accordance in numbers so near as I have just quoted. Four experiments were made on the protochloride of tin; the quantities of gas evolved in the volta-electrometer being from 2.05 to 10.29 cubic inches. The