Volume 1
A treatise on chemistry / by H.E. Roscoe and C. Schorlemmer.
- Henry Enfield Roscoe
- Date:
- 1877-1892
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A treatise on chemistry / by H.E. Roscoe and C. Schorlemmer. Source: Wellcome Collection.
624/792 page 608
![inflammable, and burns with a slightly luminous bluish flame. A mixture of the gas with double its volume of oxygen explodes in contact with a flame, much more violently than the detona- ting mixture of oxygen and hydrogen. Marsh gas also explodes, although less violently, when mixed with ten times its volume of air. Marsh gas is only slightly soluble in water, its co-efficient from 6° to 26° being obtained from the equation: c = 0-05449 - 0-0011807/ + 0-000010278/2. It is more easily soluble in alcohol, the solubility between 2° and 24° being represented by the formula: c = 0-52.258G - 0 0028655/ + 00000142/2. We have already seen that marsh gas occurs free in nature. It is evolved, together with other hydrocarbons, in large quantities in the petroleum springs. The holy fire at Baku on the Caspian Sea, which has been burning from the earliest historical times, is due to marsh gas, mixed, according to Hess, with small quantities of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and the vapours of petroleum. The gas which is evolved from the mud volcanoes of Bulganak in the Crimea has been shown by Bunsen1 to consist of pure marsh gas. The gases which escape in large quantities from the oil springs in Butler County, Pennsyl- vania, contain, according to Sadtler’s analyses,2 marsh gas and its homologues, together with hydrogen. These gases are col- lected and carried by pipes to the rolling mills at Pittsburg, a distance of fifteen miles, where the gas is employed as a fuel. Enormous quantities of marsh gas, or fire-damp, as it is termed by the miners, are evolved in coal-pits, due in all proba- bility to a slow decomposition of the coal. Reservoirs of this gas in a highly compressed state are often met with pent up in the crevices and cavities of the coal measures. Some beds of coat are so saturated with gas that when they are cut it may be heard oozing from every pore of the rock, and the coal is called by the colliers singing coal; and in other cases the gas escapes by what are termed blowers, and the mixture of gases frequently collects in the old workings or unventilated portions of the pit. Not unfrequently fire-damp bursts forth in large quantities from the seams of coal, or from the strata of clay which divide them. This is the frequent cause of the terrible accidents which 1 Gasomctry, p. 147. 2 Amer. Philos. Sue. 1876 ; see also Laurence Smith, Ann. Chivi. Plnjs. [5], viii. 566.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28122409_0001_0626.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
