"Nitrogen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ramsay from London, in a sealed glass tube holding about 140 c. cm. I take this opportunity of rendering him my most sincere thanks. In his letter Prof. Ramsay informed me that the gas had been obtained from the mineral clevite, and that it was quite free from nitrogen and other impurities, which could be removed by circulation over red hot magnesium, oxide of copper, soda lime, and pentoxide of phosphorus. The density of the gas was 2.133 and the ratio of its specific ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... our present knowledge of the elements stretches back into history: back to England's Ernest Rutherford, who in 1919 proved that, occasionally, when an alpha particle from radium strikes a nitrogen atom, either a proton or a hydrogen nucleus is ejected; to the Dane Niels Bohr and his 1913 idea of electron orbits; to a once unknown Swiss patent clerk, Albert Einstein, and his now famous theories; to Poland's Marie Curie who, in 1898, with her French husband Pierre laboriously isolated polonium ...
— A Brief History of Element Discovery, Synthesis, and Analysis • Glen W. Watson
... the occurrence of which, I could suffer an escape of so much as would be requisite to prevent explosion), but, being what it was, would, at all events, continue specifically lighter than any compound whatever of mere nitrogen and oxygen. In the meantime, the force of gravitation would be constantly diminishing, in proportion to the squares of the distances, and thus, with a velocity prodigiously accelerating, I should at length ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... stomach finishes digestion, but it only initiates the digestion of those foodstuffs which contain nitrogen, leaving fats, starches and ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... fest, it's because oysters are the only dish that never causes indigestion. In fact, it takes no less than sixteen dozen of these headless mollusks to supply the 315 grams that satisfy one man's minimum daily requirement for nitrogen. ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... proportion as the temperature of the oxygen was reduced. In the course of this inquiry another singular and instructive fact was elicited. It has been long known that at ordinary temperature, say 60 deg., pure neutral oxygen does not support animal life so well as oxygen that is diluted with nitrogen. In the nitrogen the molecules of oxygen are more freely distributed under the influence of motion, that is the meaning of the observed fact. What, then, would be the respective influence of low and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... Natural Philosophy. They are classics. All conversant with their contents agree that the experimental work was marvelous. Priestley's discovery of oxygen was epoch-making, but does not represent all that he did. Twice he just escaped the discovery of nitrogen. One wonders how this occurred. He had it in hand. The other numerous observations made by him antedate his American life and need not be mentioned here. They alone would have given him a permanent and honorable rank in the history of chemistry. Students of the science should ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... our attention more particularly to the chemical process called combustion, upon which a boiler depends for its heat. Ordinary steam coal contains about 85 per cent. of carbon, 7 per cent. of oxygen, and 4 per cent. of hydrogen, besides traces of nitrogen and sulphur and a small incombustible residue. When the coal burns, the nitrogen is released and passes away without combining with any of the other elements. The sulphur unites with hydrogen and ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... brown colouring matters, both containing nitrogen, can be obtained from raw cotton. One of these is readily soluble in alcohol, the other only sparingly so. The presence in relatively large quantities of these bodies accounts for the brown colour of Egyptian and some ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... milk, it may be cheaper, so far as the production of milk is concerned, to allow the liquid excrement to run to waste rather than to arrange for sufficient bedding. If, however, by using an abundance of bedding and saving all the high-priced nitrogen and the larger part of the potash in the manure, he is able to raise twelve tons of silage in place of eight tons, or three tons of hay in place of two tons, his enterprise as a whole will be more profitable ...
— The Young Farmer: Some Things He Should Know • Thomas Forsyth Hunt
... of oxygen and nitrogen mixed together in the proportion of 3.29 lbs. of nitrogen to 1 lb. of oxygen. Every pound of coal requires about 2.66 lbs. of oxygen for its saturation, and therefore for every pound of coal burned, 8.75 pounds of nitrogen must pass through the fire, supposing all ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... powerful explorer of molecular condition, and, of late years, it has given a new significance to the act of chemical combination. Take, for example, the air we breathe. It is a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen; and it behaves towards radiant heat like a vacuum, being incompetent to absorb it in any sensible degree. But permit the same two gases to unite chemically; then, without any augmentation of the ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... and of physical laws throughout the solar-system, and that for any high form of organic life certain conditions which are absolutely essential on our earth must also exist in Mars. He admits, for example, that water is essential, that an atmosphere containing oxygen, nitrogen, aqueous vapour, and carbonic acid gas is essential, and that an abundant vegetation is essential; and these of course involve a surface-temperature through a considerable portion of the year that renders ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... cc. which escaped, being a fair sample of the whole gas in the flask, and containing (1) 25-20.64.4 cc., absorbed by potash and therefore due to carbonic acid, and (2) 20.6-17.33.3 cc., absorbed by pyrogallate, and therefore due to oxygen, and the remaining 17.3 cc. being nitrogen, the whole gas in the flask, which has a capacity of 312 cc., will contain oxygen in the above portion and therefore its amount may be determined provided we know the total gas in the flask before opening. On the other hand we know that air normally contains approximately, ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... order to yield a crop of twenty-five bushels per acre the soil must supply 110 lbs. of nitrogen, 45 lbs. of phosphoric acid, 30.5 lbs. of lime, 14.5 lbs. of magnesia, and 142 lbs. of potash; these are approximately the mineral elements taken out of the soil with each crop, and it is needless to say that they must be replaced or the grain will starve ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... brilliantly lighted chamber that formed the interior of the car, and where stores of compressed air had been provided together with chemical apparatus, by means of which fresh supplies of oxygen and nitrogen might be obtained for our consumption during the flight through space, Mr. Edison touched a polished button, thus causing the generation of the required electrical charge on the exterior of the car, and immediately we ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, ether, aerology, aerologist, aerometry, aeroscopy, aerometer, aerography, aeriferous, aerodynamics, aerial, aerophobia, azote, barograph, barometer, cyanometry, hermetic, hermetically, meteorology, ozone, neon, pneumatic, aerator, pneumatics, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... had no cause to fear! Amedee received his degree on the same day with his friend Maurice, and both passed honorably. A little old man with a head like a baboon—the scientific examiner—tried to make Amedee flounder on the subject of nitrogen, but he passed all the same. One can hope for ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... hard by. The mud volcanoes of Turbaco, in New Granada, famous from Humboldt's description of them, lie in an asphaltic country. They are much larger than those of Trinidad, the cones being, some of them, twenty feet high. When Humboldt visited them in 1801, they gave off hardly anything save nitrogen gas. But in the year 1850, a 'bituminous odour' had begun to be diffused; asphaltic oil swam on the surface of the small openings; and the gas issuing from any of the cones could be ignited. Dr. Daubeny found the mud-volcanoes of Macaluba giving out bitumen, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... of fluctuations in temperature and pressure on the apparent volume of air in the system 83 Influence of fluctuations in the amounts of carbon dioxide and water-vapor upon residual oxygen 83 Control of residual analyses 84 Nitrogen admitted with the oxygen 84 Rejection of air 85 Interchange of air in the food aperture 85 Use of the residual blank in the calculations 86 Abbreviated method of computation of oxygen admitted to the chamber for use during short experiments 88 Criticism of the method ...
— Respiration Calorimeters for Studying the Respiratory Exchange and Energy Transformations of Man • Francis Gano Benedict
... named oxygen, might well be called "life-sustainer"; it forms about one-fifth of the air we breathe, and is that part of it which makes our fires burn and our lamps give light, and keeps us and all the animals alive. The other gas is called nitrogen; it is a dull gas, with no life in it, and remains behind when all the oxygen is taken out of the air. But this part of the air is very useful; it prevents the breathing of men and animals and the burning of fires and ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... around—he was lucky. Somehow he always managed to come back, and bring the E with him. Well, sure. He didn't want to get stuck somewhere, wind up in a gulio's gullet, gassed by an atmosphere that turned from oxygen-nitrogen into pure methane without warning or reason, and against all known chemical laws, or whiffed out in the lash of a dead star ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... of the chemist the Great War was essentially a series of explosive reactions resulting in the liberation of nitrogen. Nothing like it has been seen in any previous wars. The first battles were fought with cellulose, mostly in the form of clubs. The next were fought with silica, mostly in the form of flint arrowheads and spear-points. Then came the metals, bronze ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... would eventually be extinguished inevitably, as pointed out by Bentham, by the exhaustion of at any rate some one necessary constituent of the soil. Gilbert showed by actual analysis that the production of a "fairy ring" is simply due to the using up by the fungi of the available nitrogen in the enclosed area which continually enlarges as they seek a fresh supply on the outside margin. Anyone who cultivates a garden can easily verify the fact that every plant has some adaptation for varying degrees of seed-dispersal. It cannot be doubted that slow but persistent terrestrial ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... impossible to determine the molecular weight, he could not say what the gas was, save that the empirical formula was C{62}TH H{39}O{27}N{5}. It broke down at a temperature of only 89 deg. centigrade. The gases left consisted largely of methane, nitrogen, and methyl ether. Dick is still in the dark as to what the gas is." He paused, then exclaimed: ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... unicellular plant is always partly fluid, but never entirely so. Every living creature also consists in part (and that part is the most active living part) of a soft, viscid, transparent, colorless substance, termed protoplasm, which can be resolved into the four elements, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon. Besides these four elements, living organisms commonly contain sulphur, phosphorus, chlorine, potassium, ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... (mycoprotein) contains a high percentage of nitrogen, but is said to differ from proteid in that it is not precipitated by C{2}H{6}O. It is usually homogeneous in appearance—sometimes granular—and may contain oil globules or sap vacuoles (Fig. 85, d), chromatin granules, ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... shown by Dr. B. having declared to Huxley that he had watched the entire development of a leaf of Sphagnum. He must have worked with very impure materials in some cases, as plenty of organisms appeared in a saline solution not containing an atom of nitrogen. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... to: Air Pollution, Air Pollution-Nitrogen Oxides, Air Pollution-Sulphur 85, Air Pollution-Sulphur 94, Air Pollution-Volatile Organic Compounds, Antarctic-Environmental Protocol, Antarctic Treaty, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Desertification, Endangered Species, Environmental Modification, Hazardous Wastes, Law ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... gross feeder. It demands that plenty of nitrogenous food be in the soil. That is, the soil should be well supplied with humus, preferably derived from decaying leguminous crops or from stable manure. A favorite commercial fertilizer for parsley consists of 3 per cent nitrogen, 8 per cent potash and 9 per cent phosphoric acid applied in the drills at the rate of 600 to 900 pounds to the acre in two or three applications—especially the nitrogen, to supply which nitrate of soda is the most ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... the State of New York, will cost at least an average of twelve dollars and a half per acre, or an aggregate of one hundred millions of dollars. It is not an easy task to replace all the bone-earth, potash, sulphur, magnesia, and organized nitrogen in mould consumed in a field which has been unwisely cultivated fifty or seventy-five years. Phosphorus is not an abundant mineral anywhere, and his sub-soil is about the only resource of the husbandman after his surface-soil has lost most of its phosphates. ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... that which can be seen or actually felt, is not large enough for a definition of Matter. There are numbers of things in Nature which cannot either be seen or felt, yet which are included in the term Matter. Let us take one or two examples. Every one admits that nitrogen and oxygen are matter, yet I venture to say that no one has actually seen or felt either of these gases. Both of these gases are colourless and invisible, and are both tasteless. You may open your mouth ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... out flood waters. His land after draining is full of the stuff for which he otherwise would pay thousands and thousands of dollars. Phosphates and lime form the coverings of minute swamp life and nitrogen compounds are a part of their bodies. The polders of Holland are not richer than this swamp land; indeed, they are not so rich. One or two crops will pretty nearly extinguish the mortgage and three or four more will put the owner ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... vacuum tube in its simplest form consists of a glass bulb like an incandescent lamp in which a wire filament and a metal plate are sealed as shown in Fig. 37, The air is then pumped out of the tube and a vacuum left or after it is exhausted it is filled with nitrogen, which ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins
... combined or separated and produced further forms. But to come at once to the important part of the theory, we must at once direct our attention to four substances; these would certainly, it is said (and that no doubt is quite true) be present; they are oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon. The first three would be, when the earth assumed anything like its present conditions of temperature and air-pressure, invisible gases, as they are at present; the fourth is a substance which forms the basis ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... but about the first of September the rains came. Up to that time even the native forest trees such as oaks and chestnuts showed the stress of lack of moisture very seriously and were somewhat yellow and pale looking, mainly from water and nitrogen starvation. When the rains came the wilted trees all greened up, every tree in the parks brightened up, and we had fine growing conditions until October and no cold weather up to New Year's. It was warm that fall and even on New Year's day the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various
... time if exposed to the atmosphere. The carbonaceous elements are different in this respect. When pure starch, sugar, or fat is exposed to the air in a moistened state, they exhibit the very little tendency to change or decay. Yet if placed in contact with decomposing substances containing nitrogen, they soon begin to change, and are themselves decomposed and destroyed. This communication of the condition of change from one class of substances to another, is termed fermentation. If a fermenting substance be added to a watery solution ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... classes. Potatoes and grains furnish starches. The starchy foods are heat and force producers. Eggs, meats, nuts, milk, dried beans, peas and lentils furnish nitrogen, and are flesh and muscle producers. Butter, oil, lard, and fatty meats supply fats. Sugar, molasses, honey, fruit, ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... propose," the Governor declared dramatically, "to take nitrogen from the air and sell it to ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... obvious from the fact that when any of them is strongly heated, or allowed to putrefy, it gives off the same sort of disagreeable smell; and careful chemical analysis has shown that they are, in fact, all composed of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, combined in very nearly the same proportions. Indeed, charcoal, which is impure carbon, might be obtained by strongly heating either a handful of corn, or a piece of fowl's flesh, in a vessel from which the air is excluded so ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... mixed oxygen and nitrous gas, and that part of the air which weakens the oxygen is left behind. Burning phosphorus in confined air will also take all the oxygen from it, and there are other ways of doing the same thing. The portion of the air left behind is called nitrogen. You wouldn't know it from common air by the look; it has no color, taste, nor smell, and it won't burn. But things won't burn in it, either; and anything on fire put into it goes out directly. It ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... the protoplasm made? Is there any connexion of development to be traced whereby life can be shewn to have arisen from inorganic matter? Protoplasm, under analysis, is found to consist of some of the commonest elements on the earth's surface, such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Apart from its very complicated structure, its contents are not hard to provide. And we know that there was a time when it must of necessity have been formed out of that which was not living, {78} for there was a time when our globe was in a ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... first year, starch and protoplasm were stored up in the thickened scales of the bulb. During the second spring some of this food in store is used to send down another set of slender roots with the message to gather in more water, potash, phosphorus, nitrogen, and other substances to help grow a larger bulb. In late summer and autumn the new roots contract and pull away at the greater bulb, and down it goes into the ground another inch or so. I have a theory as to how it finally ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... 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. So is our fallowing by the classics not only to prepare the ground, clear it of weeds, aerate it, break up the clods, but also to enrich it by bringing back ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... elements be in the right proportions and readily available. If there is a deficiency of any single element there will be but a meager crop of fruit, no matter how abundant the supply of the others. An over-supply of an element, especially nitrogen, is hardly less injurious and will actually lessen the yield of fruit though it may increase the size of the vine. Not only must the food be in right proportions but in such condition as to be readily available. Tomato roots have little power to wrest plant food from the soil. The use of ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... is on a level with the river bank, so that a tramway could be laid right into them and the guano be carried down to the port of shipment, at the mouth of the Sapa Gaia River. Samples of the guano have been sent home, and have been analysed by Messrs. VOELCKER & CO. It is rich in ammonia and nitrogen and has been valued at L5 to L7 a ton in England. The bat-guano is said to be richer as a manure than that derived from the swifts. To ascend to the top of Gomanton, one has to emerge from the Simud Putih entrance and, ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... (ring structure with atoms besides carbon, such as sulfur, oxygen, nitrogen,) aromatic chemical compound with the molecular ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... hyenas, and bears, as large as our horses. (* The mould, which has covered for thousands of years the soil of the caverns of Gaylenreuth and Muggendorf in Franconia, emits even now choke-damps, or gaseous mixtures of hydrogen and nitrogen, which rise to the roof of the caves. This fact is known to the persons who show these caverns to travellers; and when I was director of the mines of the Fichtelberg, I observed it frequently in the summer-time. M. Laugier found in the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... which have yet been investigated, the substance of this germ has a peculiar chemical composition, consisting of at fewest four elementary bodies, viz., carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, united into the ill-defined compound known as protein, and associated with much water, and very generally, if not always, with sulphur and phosphorus in minute proportions. Moreover, up to the present time, protein is known only as a product and constituent of living ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... were animated trees. When I saw how they fed themselves by sticking their fingers in the hut floor, I figured the dirt would gradually lose whatever nourishment it contained, same as a farmer's fields soon lose their fertility. All plants I know about extract nitrogen and other minerals from the soil. So I figured the Greenies would need fertilizer to make up for the depleted soil in their huts. ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... of the party took courage to ask him why fire burned. "Oh, because of the hydrogen in the air, of course," was the complacent answer. "I beg your pardon, but there is no hydrogen in atmospheric air."—"There is; I know the air well: it is composed one-half of hydrogen, the other half of nitrogen and oxygen." "You're surely confounding it with water."—"No, I am as well acquainted with the composition of water as with that of air; it is composed of the same gases, only in different proportions." This was too ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... normally present in it. One volume of acetylene requires 2-1/2 volumes of oxygen for its complete combustion, and since 21 volumes of oxygen are associated in atmospheric air with 79 volumes of inert gases—chiefly nitrogen—which do not actively participate in combustion, it follows that about 11.90 volumes of air are wholly exhausted, or deprived of oxygen, in the course of the combustion of one volume of acetylene. If the light which may be developed by the acetylene is brought into consideration, ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... out. The food problem is a purely chemical one. The day when the corresponding cheap power shall have been obtained, food of all sort will be producable with carbon out of carbon oxides, and with hydrogen and acids out of water, and with nitrogen out of the atmosphere. What until now vegetation has done, industry will thenceforth perform, and more perfectly than Nature itself. The time will come when everyone will carry about him a little box of chemicals wherewith to provide his food supply ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... is preserved, and placed in filter cloths, where it is thoroughly washed with water two or three times. The residue which has sunk to the bottom is removed, dried, and forms a valuable manure, owing to the amount of the nitrogen which it contains. Its value may be increased by addition of weak vitriol, which exercises a decomposing action on the nitrogenous matter, forming with it sulphate of ammonia. The original residue from the filter-press, if it does not contain ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... well known that where the forest is burned each year the soil becomes poorer and poorer, because nitrogen, the chief fertilizing ingredient of the soil, is given off in the smoke, and only the mineral elements go back to the soil in the ashes. And, what is more injurious, the humus—i. e., the decomposed vegetable matter in ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... the book and went to the window, flung it wide, and looked out into the court. Like a tide from the plains of innocent heaven through the sultry passionate air of the world, came the coolness to his brow and heart. Oxygen, ozone, nitrogen, water, carbonic acid, is it? Doubtless—and other things, perhaps, which chemistry cannot detect. Nevertheless, give its parts what names you will, its whole is yet the wind of the living God to the bodies of ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... fruit-growers; how a friend of mine was drilling for oil and found water instead, and now has an artesian well that supplies water in great abundance, and how one Mr. Hellriegel, back in 1886, made the incidental discovery that leguminous plants fixate nitrogen, and, hence, our fields of clover, alfalfa, ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... a glib and slightly sing-song tone, which savoured of the Woolwich Military Academy, that, "gun-cotton is the name given to the explosive substance produced by the action of nitric acid mixed with sulphuric acid, on cotton fibre." He was going to add, "It contains carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, corresponding to—" when my ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne |
