or Liver of Sulphur, a combination of alkaline salt and sulphur. See Chemistry, no 1024—1025.

By means of the fume arising from the decomposition of hepar sulphuris by an acid, Mr Bergman hath found a method of imitating the hot or sulphureous mineral waters, to as great perfection as the cold ones are now imitated by fixed air. The process consists simply in adding the vitriolic acid to hepar sulphuris, and impregnating water with the peculiar species of air that arises from this mixture; in the same manner as when water is impregnated with the fixed air arising from the mixture of that or any other acid with chalk. This hepatic air, as the author calls it, is very readily absorbed by water; to which it gives the smell, taste, and all the other sensible qualities of the sulphureous waters. A Swedish cantharus of distilled water, containing 12½ Swedish cubic inches, will absorb about 60 cubic inches of this hepatic air; and on dropping into it the nitrous acid, it will appear, that a real sulphur is contained, in a state of perfect solution, in this water, to the quantity of eight grains. It does not appear that any other acid, except what the author calls the deploglificated marine acid, will produce this effect.—When any particular sulphureous water is to be imitated, we scarcely need to observe, that the saline, or other contents peculiar to it, are to be added to the artificial hepatic water. Instead of the liver of sulphur, the operator may use a mixture of three-parts of filings of iron and two parts of sulphur melted together.

It may, perhaps, be thought, that water thus prepared, does not differ from that in which a portion of the hepar sulphuris has been dissolved: but it appears evidently to differ from it in this material circumstance—that in the solution of hepar sulphuris, the sulphur is held in solution by the water, through the means of the alkali combined with it; whereas, in Mr Bergman's process, it does not appear probable that the hepar sulphuris rises substantially in the form of air; for, in that case, its presence in the hepatic water might be detected by means of the weakest of the acids (even the mephitic), which would precipitate the sulphur from it. Nor can it be supposed that any portion or constituent part of the alkali itself (except a part of its remaining fixed air) can come over. The water, therefore, must owe its impregnation to the sulphur, raised, in some peculiar manner, into the state of an elastic vapour; permanent, when the experiment is made in quicksilver; but condensible in water, and rendered soluble in that fluid through the means of some unknown principle combined with it, and which the author supposes to be the matter of heat, combined with it through the medium of phlogiston.