FROPEHTIES OF LIME.

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PROPERTIES OF LIME.

Lime is in solid masses, of a white colour, moderately hard,but easily reducible to powder. Its taste is bitter, urinous, andburning. It changes blue cabbage juice to a green. It is un-alterable by the heat of our furnaces. It splits and falls intopowder in the air, and loses its strong taste. It is augmented inweight and in size, by slowly absorbing water from the atmos-phere. Its specific gravity is 2,3. It combines with phosphorusby heat. It unites to sulphur both in the dry and humid way.It absorbs sulphurated hidrogen gas. It unites with some of themetallic oxids. Its slaking by water is attended with heat, hiss-ing, splitting, and swelling up, while the water is partly conso-lidated and partly converted into vapour; and the lime is reducedinto a very volunainous dry powder, when it has been sprinkledwith only a small quantity of water. It is soluble when wellprepared in 300 parts of water. It unites to acids. It renderssilex and alumine fusible, and more particularly these two earthstogether.

METHOD OF OBTAINING LIME;

Since the carbonic acid may be separated from the native car-bonate of lime, this becomes a means of exhibiting the lime ina state of tolerable purity. 'For this purpose, introduce into aporcelain or earthen retort, or rather into a tube of green glass,well coated over with, lute, and placed across a furnace, somepowdered Carara marble or oyster-shell powder. Adapt to itslower extremity a bent tube of glass conveyed under a bell.If we then.heat the tube, we obtain carbonic acid gas; and limewill be found remaining in the tube or retort.

Rf.mahk.. ..The burning of lime in the large way depends ontlie disengagement of the carbonic acid by heat: and, as lime isinfusible in our furnaces, there would be no danger from too

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