45 

 THE TRANSMUTATIONS OF NITROGEN. 



By Thos. MacFarlane, M.E., F.R.S.C. 



I am to speak to you this evening about Nitrogen. Very likely I 

 might not have had the honor of thus addressing you had I not felt 

 bound to try to repay your worthy Vice-President, Mr. Shutt, for the 

 kind turn he did St. George's Church Association in lecturing to them a 

 year or two ago on Oxygen, an equally important element, but much 

 more energetic and meddlesome than Nitrogen. Now since Oxygen 

 and Nitrogen may be said to be partners in many of the operations of 

 nature, I may be said, in giving this lecture, to be paying Mr. Shutt back 

 in his own coin. I prefer this expression and must carefully avoid 

 referring to the transaction as an exchange of gas, for " gas " has come 

 to be used as a figurative expression for other things besides oxygen 

 and nitrogen : in fact, generally speaking, for eloquence of an unrelia- 

 ble character. Of course it is part of my task to-night to avoid eloquence 

 of this nature and confine myself to sober and well authenticated facts, 



In choosing " Nitrogen " for my subject to-night it has seemed to 

 me that I could not do better than call attention to this more abundant, 

 although less active and less positive constituent of the atmosphere, and 

 trace certain of the wonderful changes which it undergoes in nature, for 

 nitrogen, no less than oxygen, performs its rounds, and moves in 

 stupendous cycles through the inorganic, the animal and the vegetable 

 worlds. Not unfrequently, these changes are so mysterious, and their 

 results so strange and inexplicable that I have ventured to characterise 

 them as transmutations. This term, as you well know, is applied to the 

 supposed process in which the old alchemists believed, by which one 

 metal was supposed to be actually converted into another ; and more 

 especially base metals changed into gold. Conversions almost as 

 miraculous, transformations almost as astonishing are produced in the 

 properties of the compounds into whose composition nitrogen is intro- 

 duced. That element assists by turns in building up an atmosphere, a 

 food, a poison, a colour, the bloom of a flower, the fibres of a muscle, 

 the feathers of a fowl, the force of an explosive. We may therefore 

 truly speak of its transmutations. 



