1892 The flowing bowl when and what to drink (1892, c1891)

WATER.

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by each and every distillation, but that only a part of the suspended earth was precipitated, while the greater part of it was distilled over; that by continuous distil- lation it would be possible to precipitate more and more of the suspended earth, but that the same result could not be obtained with the entire quantity. It was Lavoisier who proved the true origin of this much-disputed earth; the report of his experiments in this direction is contained in the annals of the Academy of Paris for the year 1770. He showed beyond any doubt, that water, even after long boiling in glass ves- was not transformed into earth, but that the earth which was found therein after boiling owed its exist- ence to the glass vessel. The opinion that water was an element was main- tained to the close of the eighteenth century. Cavendish first, in the year 1781, saw that water was produced when hydrogen was burned in the flame of oxygen. In 1783 Watt expressed the opinion that water consisted of oxygen and phlogiston, by which name he very likely meant hydrogen. The undoubted proof for the water's composition of oxygen and hydro- gen was given by the great Lavoisier in the same year; the quantitative analysis was first determined by Gay- Lussac, and Humboldt in the year 1805. By numerous exact experiments it is shown that water contains one volume of oxygen and two volumes of hydrogen, or, to express the same fact in weight, it consists of eight parts of oxygen and one part of hydrogen. sels,