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When we compare the formula of water with that of hydrochloric acid, we find that there is twice as much hydrogen combined with one atom of oxygen as there is combined with one atom of chlorine; and in a great many other instances, we find that we can replace two atoms of chlorine by one atom of oxygen, so that we get an idea of the exchangeable value of these elements, and we say that one atom of oxygen is worth two of chlorine, or is bivalent; similarly, nitrogen is said to be trivalent.

I should be a good deal puzzled to say what nitrogen does in the air: he is there as an inert body, and leaves all the business to the oxygen. When we breathe, for instance, the nitrogen enters our lungs together with its inseparable companion, but it goes out as it went in, without leaving a trace of its passage.

"It didn't hurt him much," observed the colonel, "and, if I have guessed right, his death will be painless." "How soon?" asked Donovan. "I can't say, but it ought not be very long. The kind of poison they use is calculated to work swiftly." In the glaring light from the nitrogen bulb they stood in the cell of the dead man, gathered about the cage of the rat a prison within a prison.

We have also learned that they can act in connection with legumes and some other plants, enabling them to fix atmospheric nitrogen and store it m their roots. By these two means the nitrogen ingredient in the soil is prevented from becoming exhausted by the processes of dissipation constantly going on.

The first year that I moved onto that farm, the first fall, we had nine cows, and I wanted to save all of the manure. Now, there wasn't an experimental station in the land. I didn't know anything about the potassium or nitrogen in the liquid manure, but I had seen where it dropped on the land and how the grass grew. I thought it was plant food, and our land was hungry.

Flesh foods, called as often nitrogenous foods, from containing so large a proportion of nitrogen, are made up of fibrine, albumen, caseine, gelatine, and gluten; the first four elements being present in flesh, the latter in vegetables. Salts of various forms exist in both animal and vegetable food. In meat, fish, and potatoes are found phosphorus, lime, and magnesia.

The caverns are lined with a white guano, now some feet thick, since it has ceased to be sought for manure; the Martialists having discovered means of saturating the soil with ammonia procured from the nitrogen of the atmosphere, which with the sewage and other similar materials enables them to dispense with this valuable bird manure.

The more modern is not the "bare fallow" which lets the land so ploughed and harrowed lie unsown even for a season, but the fallow, of varied name, where the land is sown to crops whose purpose is to gather the free nitrogen back into the ground for its enrichment.

These amounts aggregate seven tons of organic matter, or the equivalent of seventeen tons of manure, measured by the nitrogen content, or of twenty-four tons, measured by the content of organic matter.

Boil, for instance, the juice of a turnip, after straining it quite clear, and you will see a white, opaque substance produced, exactly like that which you would observe under similar circumstances in the serum of the blood; real white of egg, that is to say to call it by the name you are most familiar with with all its due proportions of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.