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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: the positive platinum plate of the decomposing cell possessed in an
extraordinary degree the power of causing oxygen and hydrogen to
combine. He traced the cause of this to the perfect cleanness of
the positive plate. Against it was liberated oxygen, which, with the
powerful affinity of the 'nascent state,' swept away all impurity
from the surface against which it was liberated. The bubbles of gas
liberated on one of the platinum plates or wires of a decomposing
cell are always much smaller, and they rise in much more rapid
succession than those from the other. Knowing that oxygen is
sixteen times heavier than hydrogen, I have more than once concluded,
and, I fear, led others into the error of concluding, that the smaller
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