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Commercium philosophico-technicum, or, the philosophical commerce of arts : designed as an attempt to improve arts, trades, and manufactures / by W. Lewis
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oould avail myself of his enquiries, which I found to be.curious and interesting, and carried, though not so far ascould be wished, yet much further than could have beenexpected, considering that for his principal experimentshe had only a hundred grains of the crude mineral, fromwhich he could pick out but forty grains of the platinato work upon,, and that he had no previous notice of itspossessing any. remarkable properties, but looked upon itat first as being only an iron mineral; he afterwards in-deed obtained some more, but it was only such anotherlittle quantity.. These experiments were made by theencouragement of Mr. assessor Rudenschœld, who haslately informed me, in a letter from Stockholm, that hebrought the platina from Spain in the year 1745, nearlyfour years before it was known in England. In one ofthe following volumes of the Swedish Handlingar , thereis another paper by the same gentleman, containing ob-servations on some parts of mine, concerning the specificgravities of mixtures of platina with other metallic bodies.

A French translation of all the papers above-mentioned,except the last of Mr Scheffers and the two last of mine,which had not come to the translators knowledge, waspubliihed at Paris in 1758, under the title of la platine ,I'or blanc , ou Iljuitieme metal: to this treatise is addedan extract of a letter from Venice, relating to what maybe called the alchemical history of platina, not containingany new facts, but some reflections drawn from mine.

Professor Marggraf, of the academy of sciences at Ber-lin, having obtained a quantity of platina from London,made a large set of experiments upon it, repeating andfurther prosecuting several os mine, and adding manynew ones, These appeared first in a French translation,among the Memoires of the Berlin academy for .the yearl 757 > Panted in 1759 : they have since been published,

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