He left Genoa by water on the 13th, and arrived at Florence on the 16th of March. Here he worked in the laboratory of the Academia del Cimento, on Iodine; but more particularly on the combustion of the Diamond. The experiments on this latter body were performed by means of the great lens in the cabinet of Natural History; the same instrument as that employed in the first trials on the action of the solar heat on the diamond, instituted by Cosmo III. Grand Duke of Tuscany: upon this occasion, he was assisted by COUNT BARDI, the Director, and SIGNIOR GAZZARI, the Professor of Chemistry at the Florentine Museum.
I have been informed that the hasty, and apparently careless manner in which he conducted his experiments, and which has been already noticed[10] as being characteristic of his style of manipulation, greatly astonished the philosophers of Florence, and even excited their alarm for the safety of the lens, which on all occasions had been used by them with such fastidious caution and delicacy.
In the very first trials on the combustion of the diamond, he ascertained a very curious circumstance that had not been before noticed; namely, that the diamond, when strongly ignited by the lens in a thin capsule of platinum, perforated with many orifices, so as to admit a free circulation of air, will continue to burn in oxygen gas after being withdrawn from the focus. The knowledge of this circumstance enabled him to adopt a very simple apparatus and mode of operation in his researches, and to complete in a few minutes experiments which had been supposed to require the presence of a bright sunshine for many hours.
The new facts obtained by the experiments on Iodine, which he had commenced at Montpellier and carried on at Florence, he embodied in a memoir, which was read before the Royal Society on the 16th of June 1814. It treated more particularly of the triple compounds containing iodine and oxygen,--of the hydrionic acid, and of the compounds procured by means of it,--of the combinations of iodine and chlorine,--of the action of some compound gases on iodine,[11]--and, lastly, of the mode of detecting iodine in combinations. "If iodine," he says, "exists in sea water, which there is every reason to believe must be the case, though in extremely minute quantities, it is probably in triple union with oxygen and sodium, and in this case it must separate with the first crystals of common salt."