i) ee | 
vam 
S. W. Johnson on some points of Agricultural Science. 78 
and wine may be deprived of odor,* color and taste, and to that 
of alumina which forms insoluble lakes with o organic pigments 
in his comprehensive investigations before alluded to, 
after studying separately as far as ton the absorptive effect 
of each ingredient of the soil, was led as a last resort to investi- 
gate the relations of the silicates to saline solutions. The simple 
silicates he found ineffectual and had recourse therefore to the 
complex silicates. He digested feldspar with solution of chlorid 
of ammonium but detected no reaction, and thence concluded 
that the fragments of granitic rocks could not perceptibly de- 
compose saline solutions. In order to trace the action of such 
ammonia meter a In the first place he procured an alu- 
mina-potash- or alumina-soda-silicate, by precipitating: the solu- 
ble alkali-silicates with a salt of alam mina; on digesting these 
double silicates with solutions of lime and ammonia, he suc- 
ceeded in replacing the potash and soda by lime and ammonia, 
though but incompletely, for different preparations of his alu- 
mina-ammonia-silicate contained but 4°51 to 5°64 per cent of 
ammonia instead of the quantity equivalent to the partly dis- 
— _— which, wip ei to him, in case of the alumina- 
soda- should be 15°47 per an. 
- vr a as characteristic of this class of double silicates, 
that there is a chigndels order in which the commonest protoxyd 
es replace each other. He arranges them in the following 
series : 
Soda—Potash—Lime—Magnesia— Ammonia: 
and according to him, potash can replace soda but not the othe 
bases; while ammonia replaces them all: or each base replaces 
those ranged to its left in the aeee series, but none of those 
veral years ago Stenhouse found that rag disinieation: ges fe f charcoal 
co 
The writer (after Stenhouse) has kept the carcass of a dead rat all sonnet 
in the working room of the Yale Analytical Labora without ace erties an 
disagreeable effluvium, simply by burying it an inch deep in 
The only odor that is perceived, is a strong one of pure ammonia, and f in : time, all the 
animal-matters envelo harcoal (or other highly porous of con- 
densing oxygen, as platinum black or inum ; probably zo most oa 
especially those rich in humus) are completely oxy: lized to water, carbonic arid and 
ammonia (free ni ?), without the app and fetid 
s that occur in a sweetening of meat by charcoal (or earth? 
consists in the oxydation Srohess) of the putref “i dead surface. Stenhouse can 
reoal ignited after moistening with chlorid of platisua) 
makes an excellent escharotic and ‘disinfectant hr foul ulcers, and latterly the sur- 
geon is employing permanganate of potash—an energetic sapling agent—for the 
same pu 
SECOND SERIES, Vou. XXVIII, No. 82.—JULY, 1859, 
10 
