“I have never been able to burn sulphur in oxygen without forming sulphuric acid in small quantities; but in several experiments I have obtained from 92 to 98 parts of sulphurous acid from 100 of oxygen in volume; from which I am inclined to believe that sulphurous acid consists of sulphur dissolved in an equal volume of oxygen.”
It was hardly to be expected that views so entirely opposed to the convictions of chemists at the time should pass unchallenged. Berzelius, the countryman of Scheele, warmly defended the doctrine of the French School, and yet another Scotch professor sought to show that Davy was still “vera troublesome.” The controversy, in which Davy himself took little part, occasioned considerable stir at the period, and was even of interest outside philosophical circles. The discussion was not without its uses, inasmuch as it led to fresh discoveries. The noise of it all, however, is now forgotten. Berzelius eventually enjoined his cook to speak no longer of oxymuriatic acid: “Thou must call it _chlorine_, Anna; that is better.” Dr. Murray, with the pertinacity of his race, still clung to the old doctrine, and defended it with no little dialectical subtlety, but he alone was faithful among the faithless. It is true there has been an occasional flutter in the dovecots since these times, and the faith of chemists in the validity of Davy’s teaching has been once or twice assailed, but as yet it has survived all assaults.
The Royal Institution possesses a book which no lover of science can regard with other than reverential interest. It is a small, well-bound quarto of some 386 manuscript pages, of notes taken by Michael Faraday, when a bookbinder’s apprentice, of the last of Davy’s lectures at the Institution. A Mr. Dance--his name deserves to be held in remembrance--had given the youth a ticket for the lectures, and Faraday, perched in the gallery over the clock, had zealously followed the expositions of the brilliant lecturer, and had subsequently, when asking for an engagement at the Institution, sent in these notes, neatly written out and embellished with drawings of the apparatus, to the Professor as evidence of the applicant’s “knowledge, diligence and order.” Among the lectures is one on chlorine, given on March 14th, 1812, the notes of which are as characteristic of the auditor as of the lecturer. We read:--