United States or Eritrea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Not only does the presence of growing timber increase and regulate the supply of running and spring water independently of any change in the amount of rainfall, but as Boussingault found at Marmato, denudation of forest is sufficient to decrease that supply, even when the rainfall has increased instead of diminished in amount.

But an adult man consumes daily abut 14 oz. of carbon, and the determination of Boussingault, according to which a horse expires 79 oz. daily, cannot be very far from the truth.

What would Johnstone, Boussingault, Liebig, and the other agricultural chemists say to this?" For ourselves, we are convinced, and would rather have some other head taken for an experiment by way of illustration. But any of our readers who is unsatisfied has only to place himself in front of a lightning-express-train with an ordinary conductor.

Boussingault remarks: "In many flowers there has been observed a very considerable evolution of heat, at the approach of fecundation. If we suppose the fecundation of the flowers of forest trees to be attended with a tenth only of this calorific power, they could not fail to exert an important influence on the warmth of the atmospheric strata in contact with them.

Twenty-two years later, Boussingault explored the valley of Aragua. For some years previous, the inhabitants had observed that the waters of the lake were no longer retiring, but, on the contrary, were sensibly rising. Grounds, not long before occupied by plantations, were submerged.

These are the authorities upon which to base any opposition to the analyses of Boussingault, Regnault, Littre, and Simon, savants of no less renown. The differences are easily explained. Woman's milk is rarely to be had in sufficient abundance to make a complete analysis of it.

Boussingault further states that the lakes of Switzerland have sustained a depression of level since the too prevalent destruction of the woods, and arrives at the general conclusion that, "in countries where great clearings have been made, there has most probably been a diminution in the living waters which flow upon the surface of theground."

Glancing over the table published by M. Becquerel in his book on climates, from the observations of Humboldt, Hall, Boussingault, and others, it becomes evident, I think, that nothing can be founded upon the comparisons therein instituted; that all reasoning, in the present state of our information, is premature and unreliable.

See the important work of Herve Mangon, Sur l'emploi des eaux dans les Irrigations, chap. ix. Boussingault observes that rain-water is vastly more fertilizing than the water of irrigating canals, and therefore the supply of the latter must be greater.

If we look at the point under discussion as purely a question of fact, to be determined by positive evidence and not by argument, the observations of Boussingault are, both in the circumstances they detail and in the weight to be attached to the testimony, among the most important yet recorded.