To get rid of a portion of mercurial vapour, he employed a difficultly fusible amalgam of mercury and tin, which was made to crystallize by cooling in the tube; but, in this case, the results were precisely the same as when pure mercury had been used. He then attempted to make a vacuum above the fusible alloy of bismuth, but he found it so liable to oxidate and soil the tube, that he soon renounced farther attempts of this kind. Nothing discouraged, he determined to try the effects of a comparatively fixed metal in fusion. By melting freshly cut pieces of grain tin, in a tube made void after having been filled with hydrogen, and by long-continued heat and agitation, he obtained a column of fixed metal which appeared to be entirely free from gas; and yet the vacuum made above this exhibited the same phenomena as the mercurial vacuum, except that they were not perceptibly increased by heat: a fact which Davy must have anticipated, as he attributed the greater display of electrical light, at high temperatures, to the effect of increased density of vapour; it is therefore a matter of surprise that he did not give more importance to the phenomenon. He made two experiments on electrical and magnetic repulsions and attractions in the mercurial vacuum, and he found that two balls, the one of platinum, the other of steel, properly arranged for the purpose, repelled each other, when the conducting wire to which they were attached was electrified in the most perfect mercurial vacuum, as they would have done in the usual cases: and that the steel globules were as obedient to the magnet as in the air; which last result, he observes, it was easy to have anticipated. He also made some comparative experiments, with the view of ascertaining, whether below the freezing point of water the diminution of the temperature of the Torricellian vacuum diminished its power of transmitting electricity, or of being rendered luminous by it. To about twenty degrees, this appeared to be the case; but between twenty degrees above, and twenty degrees below zero, the lowest temperature he could produce by pounded ice and muriate of lime, it seemed stationary; and, as well as he could determine, the electrical phenomena were very nearly of the same intensity as those produced in the vacuum above tin. "It is evident," he says, "from these general results, that the light (and probably the heat) generated in electrical discharges depends _principally_ on some properties or substances belonging to the ponderable matter through which it passes: but they prove likewise that space, where there is no appreciable quantity of this matter, is still capable of exhibiting electric phenomena--viz. those of attraction and repulsion, &c.: a fact unquestionably favourable to the idea of the phenomena of electricity being produced by a highly subtile fluid or fluids, of which the particles are repulsive with respect to each other, and attractive of the particles of other matter."