XXVII. The Bakerian Lecture. On the relations of electrical and chemical changes

Abstract

A long time has elapsed since I read before this Society the Bakerian Lecture on the Chemical Agencies of Electricity. The general laws of decomposition developed in that Paper were immediately illustrated by some practical results, which the Society did me the honour to receive in a very favourable manner; and which, by offering a class of new and powerful agents, led me away for many years into a field of pure chemical enquiry: and it is only lately, and on an occasion which is well known, that I have again taken up the subject of the general principles of electro-chemical action. After a number of new experiments, which I shall have the pleasure of laying before the Society, and notwithstanding the various novel views which have been brought forward in this and in other countries, and the great activity and extension of science, it is peculiarly satisfactory to me to find that I have nothing to alter in the fundamental theory laid down in my original communication; and which, after a lapse of twenty years, has continued, as it was in the beginning, the guide and foundation of all my researches. I am the more inclined to bring forward these new labours at the present moment, though they are far from being in a finished state, because the discovery of Oersted and that of Morichini, illustrated by some late ingenious enquiries, connect the electro-chemical changes with entirely new classes of facts, and induce a hope that many of the complicated phenomena of corpuscular changes, now obscure, will ultimately be found to depend upon the same causes, and to be governed by the same laws; and that the simplicity of our scientific arrangements will increase with every advance in the true knowledge of nature.