“Now as muriatic acid gas is known to consist of oxymuriatic gas and hydrogen, there is no simple explanation of the result, except by saying that the hydrogen of the muriatic acid combined with oxygen from the peroxide to produce water.” The bleaching power of chlorine had been explained by Scheele on the supposition that it destroyed colours by combining with phlogiston. Berthollet considered it to act by supplying oxygen. Davy then made the well-known experiment proving that the dry gas “is incapable of altering vegetable colours, and that its operation in bleaching depends entirely upon its property of decomposing water and liberating its oxygen.” It had been supposed that oxymuriatic acid gas was capable of being condensed and crystallised at a low temperature. He shows that it was only damp chlorine or its solution in water that yielded any solid product. He exposed the pure gas, dried by muriate of lime, to a temperature of -40° F., without observing any change. It is curious, however, that liquid chlorine had actually been obtained by Northmore five years before by heating the so-called hydrate of chlorine under pressure. The phenomenon was misunderstood, and it was reserved for Faraday, in 1823, to show that the product was actually the liquefied gas. Davy, who was not always happy in his suggestions as to chemical nomenclature, proposed to denote the compounds of oxymuriatic gas by the names of their bases with the termination _ane_. “Thus, argentane may signify horn-silver; stannane Libavius’s liquor; antimonane, butter of antimony; sulphurane, Dr. Thomson’s sulphuretted liquor, and so on for the rest.... In cases when two or more proportions of inflammable matter combine with one of gas; or two or more of gas with one of inflammable matter, it may be convenient to signify the proportions by affixing vowels before the name, when the inflammable matter predominates, and after the name when the gas is in excess; and in the order of the alphabet, _a_ signifying two, _e_, three, _i_, four and so on.” Thus he called phosphorus pentachloride _phosphorana_, and the trichloride _phosphorane_, because there was a larger percentage proportion of phosphorus in the latter compound than in the former. That Davy was not unaware of the difficulties and inconveniences of such a system of nomenclature may be inferred from what he says in his “Elements” concerning the names for the two chlorides of mercury, the true composition of which he was the first to discover:-- “The names _mercurane_ and _mercurana_ which may be adopted to signify the relations of their composition, are too similar to each other to be safely used as familiar appellations for the two substances, as corrosive sublimate is a powerful poison, calomel an excellent medicine.”