combustion. If I test it with a taper as I do oxygen and hydrogen, it
does not burn like hydrogen, nor does it make the taper burn like oxygen.
Try it in any way I will, it does neither the one thing nor the other: it
will not take fire; it will not let the taper burn; it puts out the
combustion of everything. There is nothing that will burn in it in common
circumstances. It has no smell; it is not sour; it does not dissolve in
water; it is neither an acid nor an alkali; it is as indifferent to all
our organs as it is possible for a thing to be. And you might say, "It is
nothing; it is not worth chemical attention; what does it do in the air?"
Ah! then come our beautiful and fine results shewn us by an observant
philosophy. Suppose, in place of having nitrogen, or nitrogen and oxygen,
we had pure oxygen as our atmosphere; what would become of us? You know
very well that a piece of iron lit in a jar of oxygen goes on burning to
the end. When you see a fire in an iron grate, imagine where the grate
would go to if the whole of the atmosphere were oxygen. The grate would
burn up more powerfully than the coals--for the iron of the grate itself
is even more combustible than the coals which we burn in it. A fire put
into the middle of a locomotive would be a fire in a magazine of fuel, if
the atmosphere were oxygen. The nitrogen lowers it down and makes it
moderate and useful for us, and then, with all that, it takes away with it
the fumes that you have seen produced from the candle, disperses them
throughout the whole of the atmosphere, and carries them away to places
where they are wanted to perform a great and glorious purpose of good to
man, for the sustenance of vegetation; and thus does a most wonderful
work, although you say, on examining it, "Why, it is a perfectly
indifferent thing." This nitrogen in its ordinary state is an inactive
element; no action short of the most intense electric force, and then in
the most infinitely small degree, can cause the nitrogen to combine
directly with the other element of the atmosphere, or with other things
round about it; it is a perfectly indifferent, and therefore to say, a