Researches Chemical and Philosophical: Chiefly Concerning Nitrous oxide or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air and its Respiration

In consequence of the discovery of the respirability and extraordinary effects of nitrous oxide, or the dephlogisticated nitrous gas of Dr. Priestley, made in April 1799, in a manner to be particularly described hereafter, I was induced to carry on the following investigation concerning its composition, properties, combinations, and mode of operation on living beings.


In the course of this investigation, I have met with many difficulties; some arising from the novel and obscure nature of the subject, and others from a want of coincidence in the observations of different experimentalists on the properties and mode of production of the gas. By extending my researches to the different substances connected with nitrous oxide; nitrous acid, nitrous gas and ammoniac; and by multiplying the comparisons of facts, I have succeeded in removing the greater number of those difficulties, and have been enabled to give a tolerably clear history of the combinations of oxygene and nitrogene.


By employing both analysis and synthesis whenever these methods were equally applicable, and comparing experiments made under different circumstances, I have endeavoured to guard against sources of error; but I cannot flatter myself that I have altogether avoided them. The physical sciences are almost wholly dependant on the minute observation and comparison of properties of things not immediately obvious to the senses; and from the difficulty of discovering every possible mode of examination, and from the modification of perceptions by the state of feeling, it appears nearly impossible that all the relations of a series of phænomena can be discovered by a single investigation, particularly when these relations are complicated, and many of the agents unknown. Fortunately for the active and progressive nature of the human mind, even experimental research is only a method of approximation to truth.


In the arrangement of facts, I have been guided as much as possible by obvious and simple analogies only. Hence I have seldom entered into theoretical discussions, particularly concerning light, heat, and other agents, which are known only by isolated effects.

Early experience has taught me the folly of hasty generalisation. We are ignorant of the laws of corpuscular motion; and an immense mass of minute observations concerning the more complicated chemical changes must be collected, probably before we shall be able to ascertain even whether we are capable of discovering them. Chemistry in its present state, is simply a partial history of phænomena, consisting of many series more or less extensive of accurately connected facts.