Academy of Science. 



carefully sought for the adequate causes which have brought about so admirable a 

 sanitary result. Our altitude above the sea is considerable, and yet is manifestly 

 insufficient to account for so well marked a condition. Our atmosphere is pro- 

 verbially a dry one; but an arid climate is not necessarily a healthful one. Now it 

 is far from being the object of this paper to attempt any solution of this interesting 

 problem, in which so many elements must obviousl^y enter, and in the discussion of 

 which any unanimity of opinion is wcll-nigli impossible. It is simply my desire to 

 call your attention as a possible explanation of our climatic superiority, to the 

 existence of an element which has thus far received little attention among us: the 

 Ozone, everywhere prevalent in Kansas atmosphere. Nor is it any part of my 

 intention to present here any elaborate discussion of the nature of this element nor 

 of its supposed relations to the conditions of health and disease. This element has 

 now been known to chemists barely thirty-five years, and yet ever since its discovery 

 in 1840, by Schonbein, of Basle, it has probably received from chemists more uni- 

 versal attention with less satisfactorj^ results than any other one body. It is only 

 recently that a prominent member of the British Association pronounced any 

 attempt to mvestigate the nature or relations of Ozone, " a delusion and a snare," 

 and the great majority of English and American chemists have seemed disposed to 

 "take him at his word," as its investigation has been by them almost wholly neg- 

 lected. The whole matter seems to have been left to the researches of a few German 

 and French chemists whose half contradictor}- results have appeared only in 

 disjointed articles in the foreign periodicals. Indeed but one volume of English 

 authorship, making any pretentions to thoroughness in the matter, has appeared; 

 and even in this the subject is treated in a most fragmental and unsatisfactory 

 manner. 



But notwithstanding this disheartening meagerness of knowledge of the nature 

 of Ozone and of the conditions in which it appears, there can be no shadow of a 

 doubt that the relations which it sustains to organic life in every form are of most 

 vital importance, and that we to-day are more generally indebted for our sanitary 

 well-being to its indirect influence than we have as yet any conception. Now we 

 know this Ozone to be an allotropic form of oxygen. We know it to be commonly 

 produced by the action of electricity on the oxygen of our common air. Its 

 peculiar odor as thus produced has been known from the most remote antiquity. 

 Homer, in his Odyssey, sj^caks of the atmosphere, after the passage of the thunder- 

 bolt, as being "quite full of sulphurous odor," and it is a common experience 

 of those who have happened near a lightning stroke that it is instantly followed by 

 this strong characteristic odor. A positive proof of this fact, however, was fur- 

 nished by a Swiss scientist, Buchwalder, who, while traveling in the Alps, was 

 overtaken by a violent thunder storm in which his guide was instantly killed by a 

 lightning stroke, and the powerful odor was at once apparent. Shortly afterward 

 he visited the laboratory at Basle, in which Schonbein was manufacturing a large 

 quantity of Ozone for experiment, when he at once expressed his astonishment at 

 the strong "smell of lightning" which he had just observed a few daj's before in 

 the thunder storm on the Alps. Thus the identity of the phenomena was plainly 

 established. The same odor may be observed around an electrical machine during 

 its operation in a close dry room. The allotropic condition of Ozone, however, is 

 best illustrated by a single experiment. We know that the metal silver remains 

 bright and unaltered in dry oxygen gas. But let a strip of silver be enclosed in a 

 tube of oxygen, and let a succession ot electric sparks be passed through. Ozone 

 will be produced and the silver will almost immediately become covered with a black 



