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Excerpt from A Dictionary of Chemistry and Mineralogy: With Their Applications
Of the fifty-two ponderable principles, four, possibly five, require a distinct collocation, from the marked peculiarity of their powers and properties. These are named Chlorine, Oxygen, Iodine, Fluorine, and Bromine. These bodies display a pre-eminent activity of combination, an intense affinity for most of the other forty-seven bodies, which they corrode, penetrate, and dissolve; or, by uniting with them, so impair their cohesive force, that they become friable, brittle, or soluble in water, however dense, refractory and insoluble, they previously were. Such changes, for eple, are operated on platinum, gold, silver, and iron, by the agency of chlorine, oxygen, or iodine. But the characteristic feature of these archeal elements is this, that when a compound consist ing of one of them, and one of the other forty-seven more passive ele ments, is exposed to voltaic electrization, the former is uniformly evcl ved at the positive or vitreo-electric pole, while the latter appears at the negative or resino-electric pole.
The singular strength of their attractions for the other simple forms of matter is also manifested by the production of heat and light, or the phenomenon of combustion, at the instant of their mutual combination.
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