[Footnote: Read before the British Association, Southampton Meeting,
Section B, 1882.]
By HAROLD B. DIXON, M.A., Millard Lecturer in Chemistry, Balliol and
Trinity Colleges, Oxford.
Two years ago I had the honor of showing before the Chemical Section of
the British Association some experiments, in which a well-dried mixture
of carbonic oxide and oxygen was submitted to electric sparks without
exploding.[1] It was further shown that the introduction of a very
minute quantity of aqueous vapor into the non-explosive mixture was
sufficient to cause explosive combination between the gases when the
spark was passed. The hypothesis advanced to account for the observed
facts was that carbonic oxide does not unite directly with oxygen at
a high temperature, but only indirectly through the intervention of
water-vapor present, a molecule of water being decomposed by one of
carbonic oxide to form a molecule of carbonic acid and one of free
hydrogen, and the latter uniting with the oxygen to re-form a molecule
of water, which again undergoes the same cycle of changes, till all the
oxygen is transferred to the carbonic oxide:
H_{2}O + CO = H_{2} + CO_{2}
H_{2} + O = H_{2}O
[Footnote 1: "Report of British Association," 1880, p.
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