Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V. CONNEXION BETWEEN THE ATOMIC WEIGHT AND VOLUME OF A BODY. 205. It has been already remarked, that the compression of solid and fluid bodies, their elasticity, and other characters, have given rise to the opinion, that their smallest particles, the atoms, are not in perfect contact, but at certain distances from one another. This distance increases when the body is healed ; it becomes smaller when the atoms are exposed to a certain pressure. Solid and fluid bodies expand unequally when heated, and the diminution of the volume by equal pressure is also very different. From these facts, it has been concluded, that the distances of (he atoms of solid and liquid bodies is not ihe same in all. This inequality is not noticed in gaseous bodies ; all gases expand equally, for the same. degree of heat, and their volume increases or diminishes equally for the same pressure. From these facts, the conclusion has been drawn, that the constitution of gases is perfectly the same ; that the atoms of gases are, in all, equally distant from one another. Hence, it evidently follows, that two gases of the same volume contain the same number of atoms. When this proposition is regarded as true, the numbers which express the equivalent of hydrogen, azote, and some other bodies, are not the relative weights of the atoms of the same. 2 volumes hydrogen unite with 1 volume oxygen. Hydrogen. Oxygen. 206. It is clear, when the gases of the same volume contain the same number of atoms, that 2 or 3 volumes of a gas must contain 2 or 3 times more atoms of the same. In water, 100 oxygen combine exactly with 12.479 hydrogen ; the volume of hydrogen, as gas, amounts exactly to twice the volume of oxygen, whence it follows, that 12.479 hydrogen express the weight of 2 atoms of hydrogen, and...