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Closed stoves are useful in some places, such as entrance halls. They are more economical than the open fireplaces; but with them there is danger of the atmosphere, or rather, the minute particles of organic matter always floating in the air, becoming burnt and so charging the atmosphere with carbonic acid. The recently introduced slow-combustion stoves obviate this evil.
The first thought which naturally suggests itself is to burn the graphite and weigh the carbonic acid produced; but in the case of the sample which led me to seek for another method, this way could not be employed, for the specimen had been taken from the surface, and was covered and penetrated by vegetable growths which could not be entirely removed mechanically.
And now, if I examine this jar with the lighted taper, I shall find that the carbonic acid has fallen into it, and it no longer has any power of supporting the combustion. If I blow a soap-bubble, which of course will be filled with air, and let it fall into this jar of carbonic acid, it will float. But I shall first of all take one of these little balloons filled with air.
When water is formed, the two gases disappear, and an exactly equal weight of water appears in their place; but if living protoplasm is enabled to imbibe liquid or other nutriment containing ammonia, water, and carbonic acid, there is no disappearance of the three elements and an equivalent weight of living protoplasm appearing in its place.
But while it is true that animals do thus reduce some of their foods to the simple condition of carbonic acid and water, this is not true of most of the foods which contain nitrogen. The nitrogenous foods are as necessary for the life as the carbon foods, and animals do not reduce their nitrogenous foods to the condition in which plants can prey upon them.
If solar radiation is indispensable to the decomposition of carbonic acid and the building up of the primary substances in the case of higher vegetable life, it is still possible that certain inferior organisms may do without it and nevertheless yield the most complex substances, fatty or carbo-hydrate, such as cellulose, various organic acids, and proteic matter; not, however, by borrowing their carbon from the carbonic acid which is saturated with oxygen, but from other matters still capable of acquiring oxygen, and so of yielding heat in the process, such as alcohol and acetic acid, for example, to cite merely carbon compounds most removed from organization.
A candle will burn some four, five, six, or seven hours. What, then, must be the daily amount of carbon going up into the air in the way of carbonic acid! What a quantity of carbon must go from each of us in respiration! What a wonderful change of carbon must take place under these circumstances of combustion or respiration!
In putting him down to sleep, you should ascertain that his face be not covered with the bedclothes; if it be, he will he poisoned with his own breath the breath constantly giving off carbonic acid gas; which gas must, if his face be smothered in the clothes; be breathed carbonic acid gas being highly poisonous.
Chemical changes in the blood and tissues are constant vital phenomena; increased oxidation causes increased activity of the circulation, increase of temperature, increase of urea and carbonic acid in the economy from retrograde changes, and, finally, during menstrual life the flow of blood from the uterus carried off the effete materials from the highly charged system.
One quart of water, three pounds of sugar, one teaspoonful of lemon oil, one table-spoonful of flour, with the white of four eggs, well beat up. Mix the above well together, then divide the syrup, and add four ounces of carbonic soda in one-half, and three ounces of tartaric acid in the other half; then bottle for use.
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