expense
of the other, and the other disoxygenated in favour of it.

Nor does the solution, or decomposition of metals by acids, the
combustion of inflammable and vital air for the production of water,
stand in need of external heat or fire, any more than the low
combustion in which fermentation consists for the production of spirit,
beer, or wine, than that generated by the self-operation of its own
temperature; similar to this is the self-animating principle or power
with which nature has endowed the animal body of generating its own
heat by respiration.

In fermentation, the caloric, or matter of heat, which is plentifully
disengaged by the condensation of oxygen, is prevented from breaking
out into flame with the condensing hydrogen, from the presence of
affinities in the fermenting mass, ready to absorb and fix them into
vinous spirit, ale, beer, &c., with the other component element,
carbon; by which they are too instantaneously taken up and fixed, to
amount to more than bare ebullition, and pass at once from an incipient
state of elasticity, to a fixed and non-elastic one, while the
redundant heat, which would otherwise appear, is taken up and carried
off by the abundant formation of carbonic acid gas, which requires so
great a quantity of caloric to render it permanently elastic, as not
only keeps this sort of combustion under ignition, but much below the
degree of heat at which the accumulating vinous spirit could be raised
to the evaporable or distilling point, though capable, as already
observed, of detaching a considerable portion of it with the volatile
gas, and of the water of solution, or the water of composition recently
formed from the present attractions in its most volatile and incipient
state of formation; both which we have seen ascend with the fixed air
extricated, partly in a combined, and partly in an uncombined state.

One part of hydrogen is sufficient to saturate and fix above five of
carbon, and they require nearly sixteen parts of oxygen to complete
their formation into alcohol, while the water of dilution undergoes a
proportionate decomposition and recomposition, to assist the
resolutions and combinations, and support the admirable equilibrium
preserved by nature.

At the same time that the extreme levity of the hydrogen gas accounts
for the great quantity of heat which it holds in combination, and the
high temperature requisite to effect its decomposition, and that such
is its capacit