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When the chica is subjected to distillation, it yields no sensible traces of ammonia. It is not, like indigo, a substance combined with azote. It dissolves slightly in sulphuric and muriatic acids, and even in alkalis. Ground with oil, the chica furnishes a red colour that has a tint of lake. Applied to wool, it might be confounded with madder-red.
For example, in order to ascertain what principle in the atmosphere enables it to sustain life, the variation we require is that a living animal should be immersed in each component element of the atmosphere separately. But nature does not supply either oxygen or azote in a separate state.
Senor Emperan showed us cottons dyed with native plants, and fine furniture made exclusively of the wood of the country. The name of his native country pronounced on a distant shore would not have been more agreeable to the ear of a traveller, than those words azote, oxide of iron, and hygrometer, were to ours.
A man under the stress of a feeling which by its intensity has become a monomania, often finds himself in the frame of mind to which opium, hasheesh, or the protoxyde of azote might have brought him. Spectres appear, phantoms and dreams take shape, things of the past live again as they once were. What was but an image of the brain becomes a moving or a living object.
"Hunger?" said John Mangles. "Hunger!" repeated Paganel; "but, above all, the necessity of the carnivorous appetite of replacing the bodily waste, by the azote contained in animal tissues. The lungs are satisfied with a provision of vegetable and farinaceous food. But to be strong and active the body must be supplied with those plastic elements that renew the muscles.
What he did with the bottle of oxygen matters but little to us; but in the bottle of azote he plunged, by way of experiment, an unfortunate mouse, and subsequently a little bird, both of whom, finding no oxygen to breathe, died one after the other.
To terminate this rapid history, I may add that a certain Hans Pfaal, of Rotterdam, went up in a balloon filled with a gas made from azote, thirty-seven times lighter than hydrogen, and reached the moon after a journey of nineteen days. This journey, like the preceding attempts, was purely imaginary, but it was the work of a popular American writer of a strange and contemplative genius.
But air which is merely cold to the feelings air in which the thermometer stands high, but which merely gives us one of the external sensations of coolness on being made by a punkah, or any other mere blowing machine, to move rapidly over our skin or on being charged with watery vapour, or on being contrasted with previous excessive heat such air must, nevertheless, be rarefied to the full extent indicated by the mercurial thermometer, and give us, therefore, our supply of vital oxygen in a very diluted form, and of a meagre, unsupporting, and unsatisfying consistence.... The sine quâ non, therefore, for healthy and robust life in tropical countries, is air cold and dry cold to the thermometer and dry to the hygrometer; or, in other words, dense, and containing little else than the necessary oxygen and azote, and this supplied to a room, fresh and fresh, in a continual current.
This fire, which resembles the springs of hydrogen, or Salse, of Modena, or what is called the will-o'-the-wisp of our marshes, does not burn the grass; because, no doubt, the column of gas, which develops itself, is mixed with azote and carbonic acid, and does not burn at its basis.
"Is it possible?" they all said. "I am not speaking of the hygienic qualities of the climate," continued Paganel, "rich as it is in oxygen and poor in azote. There are no damp winds, because the trade winds blow regularly on the coasts, and most diseases are unknown, from typhus to measles, and chronic affections." "Still, that is no small advantage," said Glenarvan.
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