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Updated: June 3, 2025
The solids, liquids, and aeriform fluids of our globe are all, as has been stated, reducible into fifty-five substances hitherto called elementary. Six are gases; oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen being the chief. Forty-two are metals, of which eleven are remarkable as composing, in combination with oxygen, certain earths, as magnesia, lime, alumin.
With the help of these qualitative concepts we are now in a position to determine more clearly still the difference between the older and the modern conceptions: in particular the difference between the aeriform condition of matter, as we conceive of it to-day, and the element Air. Contractedness manifests as material density, or the specific weight of a particular substance.
Everything with which we are conversant upon the surface of the earth is solid, liquid, or aeriform; but the notion of the elementary nature of air, earth, and water, so universally held, was now discovered to belong to the errors of the past. Fire was found to be but the visible and otherwise perceptible indication of changes proceeding within the, so called, elements.
From the thickness of the bed of loose fragments, with which the surrounding country is covered, the amount of aeriform matter necessary for their projection must have been enormous; hence we may suppose it probable that after the explosions vast subterranean caverns were left, and that the falling in of the roof of one of these produced the hollow here described.
No scientific person at this day doubts that our solar system is a progressive development, whether in his conception he begins with molten masses, or aëriform or nebulous masses, or with a fluid revolving mass of vast extent, from which the specific existing worlds have been developed one by one.
For it consists to a great extent of the decaying bodies of those human beings whose souls are in another state of existence. The organized watery and aeriform structures of which human bodies were formed become disintegrated, and dissolve into the rest of the earth’s substance.
The reversed currents are, then, arrested during their passage; and, in order to collect them, it becomes necessary to considerably diminish the gaseous pressure of the aeriform conductor interposed in the discharge; to increase its conductivity; or to open to the current a very resistant metallic derivation.
Arguing thus, Priestley, of course, named the new aeriform substance dephlogisticated air, and thought of it as ordinary air deprived of some, or it might be all, of its phlogiston. The breathing of animals and the burning of substances were supposed to load the atmosphere with phlogiston.
We do not know that it was once wholly aeriform, mere gasses in combination, too crude to admit of solidarity; but reasoning back from established facts, the conclusion is almost irresistible, that this earth, now so rock-ribbed and solid, so ponderous, so ragged with mountain ranges, and cloud piercing peaks, was once but vapor, floating without form through limitless space, drifting as mere nebulous matter among the older creations of God.
H. Moyes, of Edinburgh, relative to experiments made with the pile, we find the following passage: "When the column in question had reached the height of its power, its sparks were seen by daylight, even when they were made to jump with a piece of carbon held in the hand." On page 214 he describes and figures an apparatus for taking the galvano-electric spark into fluid and aeriform substances.
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