ke a coated jar; as the silver, naturally possessing more
vitreous electric ether, repels the vitreous ether, which the zinc
possesses in less quantity, and attracts the resinous ether of the
zinc. Whence the inferior surface of the plate of zinc abounds now
with vitreous ether, and its upper surface with resinous ether.
Beneath this pair of plates lay a cloth moistened with water, or with
some better conductor, as salt and water, or a slight acid mixed with
water, or volatile alcali of ammoniac mixed with water, and this
vitreous electric ether on the lower surface of the zinc plate will be
given to the second silver plate which lies beneath it; and thus this
second silver plate will possess not only its own natural vitreous
atmosphere, which was denser or in greater quantity than that of the
zinc plate next beneath it, but now acquires an addition of vitreous
ether from the zinc plate above it, conducted to it through the moist
cloth.

This then will repel more vitreous ether from the second zinc plate
into the third silver one; and so on till the plates of air between
the zincs and silvers are all charged, and each stronger and stronger,
as they descend in the pile.

If the reader still prefers the Franklinian theory of positive and
negative electricity, he will please to put the word positive for
vitreous, and negative for resinous, and he will find the theory of
the Galvanic pile equally thus accounted for.

5. When a Galvanic pile is thus placed, and a communication between
the two ends of it is made by wires, so that the electric shocks pass
through water, the water becomes decomposed in some measure, and
oxygen is liberated from it at the point of one wire, and hydrogen at
the point of the other; and this though a syphon of water be
interposed between them. This curious circumstance seems to evince the
existence of two electric ethers, which enter the water at different
ends of the syphon, and have chemical affinities to the component
parts of it; the resinous ether sets at liberty the hydrogen at one
end, and the vitreous ether the oxygen at the other end of the
conducting medium.

Hence it must appear, that the longer the Galvanic pile, or the
greater the number of the alternate pieces of silver and zinc that it
consists of, the stronger will be the Galvanic shock; but there is
another circumstance, difficult to explain, which is the perpetual
decomposition of water by the Galvanic pile; when water is mad