NITROGEN : WHY AND WHERE CROPS MUST GET IT. 197 



am not the only one to hold this belief. Such leakage could easily 

 occur unless great care were taken to guard against it ; and some 

 precautions that a trained chemist would naturall}^ take might not 

 be thought of by a trained watchmaker. I am assured, further, 

 that the verdict of the committee of the Academy was secured 

 through a fraud. This fraud consisted in the substitution, during 

 the night previous to one of the latest visits of the committee, 

 of more healthy and vigorous plants for the feeble ones which had 

 grown in the case, and which showed by their appearance that they 

 were suffering for want of some constituent of their natural food ; 

 and as they had been supplied with everything but combined nitro- 

 gen, it is reasonable to suppose that it was for want of this that 

 they had suffered. The- substituted plants, that had been put 

 into the case that night, were the ones really analyzed, and used 

 as evidence of the assimilability of free nitrogen. Dr. Pugh, 

 who communicated this information to me, received it directly from 

 one who saw the sickly plants in the case at night, and the 

 healthy ones there the next morning. This piece of shameful 

 history offez's the only solution of what would otherwise be an 

 inexplicable riddle. 



Furthermore, I believe in these results that have been given us 

 by Boussingault, and by Lawes, Gilbert, and Pugh, because they 

 are reasonable. They are in full accord with what we know of 

 the chemical properties of nitrogen, and of the kind of food, other 

 than nitrogenous, that the plant depends upon for sustenance. 



Any who have studied chemistry at all know that there are two 

 sharply distinct classes or substances dealt with in that science, 

 namely, the elementaiy substances, and the chemical compounds ; 

 that the elements are bodies that we have not yet been able to 

 break up into two or more different and distinct bodies ; that a 

 compound body is made up by the chemical union of two or more 

 of these elements ; that oxygen, nitrogen, gold, silver, iron, etc., 

 are elements; and that water, ammonia, phosphoric acid, lime, 

 etc., are compound bodies. Now the plant is made up entirely of 

 . compound substances — and, leaving for the moment its nitrogenous 

 food out of consideration, with respect to all its other food it is 

 absolutely certain that it feeds only on compound bodies or chemi- 

 cal compounds ; this is one good reason why we should expect 

 that it would not feed on the element, nitrogen, but on some of 

 the various compounds of nitrogen which we know by experience 



