the
metals barium, calcium, and strontium being thus discovered. Thereafter
Davy always referred to the supposed elementary substances (including
oxygen, hydrogen, and the rest) as "unde-compounded" bodies. These
resist all present efforts to decompose them, but how can one know what
might not happen were they subjected to an influence, perhaps some day
to be discovered, which exceeds the battery in power as the battery
exceeds the blowpipe?

Another and even more important theoretical result that flowed from
Davy's experiments during this first decade of the century was the
proof that no elementary substances other than hydrogen and oxygen are
produced when pure water is decomposed by the electric current. It was
early noticed by Davy and others that when a strong current is passed
through water, alkalies appear at one pole of the battery and acids at
the other, and this though the water used were absolutely pure. This
seemingly told of the creation of elements--a transmutation but one step
removed from the creation of matter itself--under the influence of the
new "force." It was one of Davy's greatest triumphs to prove, in the
series of experiments recorded in his famous Bakerian lecture of 1806,
that the alleged creation of elements did not take place, the substances
found at the poles of the battery having been dissolved from the walls
of the vessels in which the water experimented upon had been placed.
Thus the same implement which had served to give a certain philosophical
warrant to the fading dreams of alchemy banished those dreams
peremptorily from the domain of present science.

"As early as 1800," writes Davy, "I had found that when separate
portions of distilled water, filling two glass tubes, connected by moist
bladders, or any moist animal or vegetable substances, were submitted
to the electrical action of the pile of Volta by means of gold wires,
a nitro-muriatic solution of gold appeared in the tube containing the
positive wire, or the wire transmitting the electricity, and a solution
of soda in the opposite tube; but I soon ascertained that the muriatic
acid owed its existence to the animal or vegetable matters employed;
for when the same fibres of cotton were made use of in successive
experiments, and washed after every process in a weak solution of nitric
acid, the water in the apparatus containing them, though acted on for
a great length of time with a very strong power, at last produced no
effect