Oxford Feb 4th 1848
My dear Faraday,
I return with many thanks your interesting paper1, which was quite new to me, although I have seen [word illegible] make an experiment which evidently depended upon the same principle, namely that of passing steam through a mixture of common salt & clay or sand in a leaded tube when pure Muriatic acid was decomposed.
No doubt this principle comes into play generally in volcanic processes although I cannot but feel, as Herschel confesses in his Review of Kosmos2, that a premium mobile is wanted by those who assume the existence of a high external heat as their starting point3. This premium mobile I have attempted to supply in the supposed action of water upon the metallic bases of the earths & alkalies after which the other phenomena follow naturally[.]
Believe me | very truly | Yours | Chas Daubeny
HUMBOLDT, Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von (1845-62): Kosmos. Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung, 5 volumes, Stuttgart and Tübingen.
TILGHMAN, Richard Albert (1847): “On the decomposing power of Water at high temperatures”, Trans. Am. Phil. Soc., 10: 173-6.
Please cite as “Faraday2050,” in Ɛpsilon: The Michael Faraday Collection accessed on 28 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/faraday/letters/Faraday2050