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It cannot, however, be stated to be any one gas in particular, since it is a mechanical mixture of at least three different gases, and often contains small quantities of others. A very large proportion consists of what is known as marsh-gas, or light carburetted hydrogen. It is disengaged wherever vegetable matter has fallen and has become decayed.
Marsh-gas, together with hydrogen and the monoxide of carbon, the last of which burns with the dull blue flame often seen at the surface of fires, particularly coke and charcoal fires, form about 87 per cent. of the whole volume of house-gas, and are none of them anything but poor illuminants. Others of the olefines are present in minute quantities.
It has been found possible to gradually range most carbon compounds under two categories, either as marsh-gas or as benzol derivatives, as fatty compounds or as aromatic compounds. To do this, methods of analysis very different from those used in mineral chemistry had to be applied. The mere finding out of percentage composition tells us little or nothing about an organic compound.
Nicotine, C H N , the next simplest in formula of the alkaloids, is a tertiary base, that is, contains no replaceable hydrogen atoms in its molecule. It shows very close relations to pyridine. When nicotine vapor is passed through a red-hot tube, it yields essentially collidine, and, with this, some pyridine, picoline, lutidine, and gases such as hydrogen, marsh-gas, and ethylene.
Marsh-gas was there in plenty, though there is no heat from the tiny flames, as you know, from which fact, no doubt, our friend Brellier derived the very theatrical name for them, but the light of which Merriton spoke I took to be something bigger than that. And I had noticed, too, that here and there among the flames danced brilliant patches that seemed, well more than natural.
Fire-damp, marsh-gas, or carburetted hydrogen, is colorless, almost scentless; it burns with a blue flame, and makes respiration impossible. The miner could not live in a place filled with this injurious gas, any more than one could live in a gasometer full of common gas.
"While your feelings were excited by the unusual episode, the strange surroundings and the dark, she related to you a wild legend of witchcraft and monsters. Later, when you suffered your first attack of marsh-gas poisoning, your consequent hallucination took form from the story you had just heard. Later conversations with your mysterious lady fixed the idea into an obsession.
The alkaloids, that most important class from a medical and pharmaceutical point of view, have until quite recently been defined in the books simply as "vegetable bases, containing nitrogen." Whether they were marsh-gas or benzol derivatives was not made out; how the four elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, were grouped together in them was absolutely a thing unknown.
Marsh-gas is the first of the series of hydro-carbons known chemically as the paraffins, and is an extremely light substance, being little more than half the weight of an equal bulk of air.
"What's that, my lord? What has the Frozen Flame to do with all this? Why, the answer to that is as simple as A.B.C. The Frozen Flames, or that most natural of phenomena, marsh-gas of which I won't weary you with an explanation arose from that part of the Fens where the rotting vegetation was at its worst.
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