236. ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



mination nor nutrition can be sustained. In New England, whatever 

 may be the attention bestoAved on preparing the soil, vegetation lan- 

 guishes or ceases during some weeks of the season, when the tempera- 

 ture of the torrid zone is exceeded, and the length of the day's heating 

 prevents any great reduction of temperature during the night. With 

 a dew point almost unnaturally high, there is not usually any conden- 

 sation as rain, and no copious deposition as dew. Fields covered with 

 grass become scorched ; the uniform tint of ripening precedes the 

 appearance of a dessication, which permits the winds to disperse the 

 most of the covering, and no green color relieves the eye. If, after the 

 grass has thus perished, and nothing but chaff-like remains can be 

 found, rain falls for some hours, the effect is almost miraculous ; the 

 temperature of the earth near the surface does not fall ; germination, 

 more active than that of the torrid zone, succeeds, and repeatedly crops 

 have been observed which matured on the tenth day after the rain 

 commenced. It must be evident, to every reflecting mind, that no mere 

 salt or saline compound can give to water such power as this. Salts 

 and their compounds cannot maintain the high temperature of the 

 earth under the cooling effect of evaporation ; and experience has, 

 through ages of observation, shown that those additions made to the 

 soil, intended as food for plants, must be in a fermenting state, or be 

 eminently fitted to assume such conditions. The more fertile a soil, 

 either naturally or as resulting from judicious cultivation, the more in 

 quantity of matter, having the character of a ferment, we always find 

 in our analysis. 



" It is, therefore, in view of the character which pyrrhine possesses in 

 mixture with other bodies, of entering into a true fermentation, that I 

 have ventured to give it so much significance as a constituent of our 

 atmosphere, and to show that all the influences which atmospheric 

 ammonia has been supposed to exert, may, with more propriety, be as- 

 cribed to pyrrhine. In a strictly chemical view, the fact that our atmos- 

 phere has an excess of carbonic acid always present, that this excess is 

 round in fertile soils, is opposed to any conclusions of a salt of ammonia 

 acting in vegetation, except as a carrier of carbonic acid, either directly 

 or by decomposition with humid compounds." 



SCHONBEIN'S OZO^S. 



THE following is a report of a lecture recently delivered before the 

 Royal Society, by Professor Faraday, on the properties and nature of 

 ozone. This name had been given by Schonbein to a substance or 

 condition of matter which manifested itself under very peculiar and 

 widely different circumstances. Schonbein regarded it as an indepen- 

 dent body, and a constituent of the atmosphere ; but in his (Prof. Fara- 

 day's) opinion it was nothing more than an allotropic condition of ox- 

 ygen. It was never manifested except where oxygen was present, and 

 where, at the same time, water in a liquid or vaporous condition was 

 found. No substance had ever been separated from the atmosphere where 

 ozone existed ; but its presence was manifested, not merely by the strong 

 smell peculiar to it, but by certain well-marked chemical properties, 



