337 
Extracts from British and Foreign Journals. 
ATMOSPHERIC SUPPLY OF MANURING MATTER. 
Professor Way, consulting chemist to the Royal Agricul- 
tural Society of England, recently delivered a lecture before 
the members on modern researches connected with this sub- 
ject, which he regarded by no means a merely theoretical one, 
as it might at first seem ; but one fraught with the most 
practical results in reference to agricultural operations. He 
glanced at the germination of seeds on surfaces containing 
little or no depth of soil, until rocks and towers became 
covered with vegetation — to the forests of Western America, 
where successive scourging crops of tobacco and sugar were 
required to destroy the accumulated fertility — and to the coal- 
beds of various countries, which had their origin in vegetable 
matter ; facts which he thought must strike the most unob- 
servant, that the air, producing as it did these vegetable 
products, must possess something more than a mere inert 
mixture of elastic fluids. He referred to the advantages 
derived by real science, though unintentionally, from the 
labours of the alchemists in their researches for gold and the 
elixir of life ; but especially to the philosophical and more 
legitimate investigations of Priestley, Bergman, Scheele, 
Lavoisier, and De Saussure, whose genius in the direction of 
their experiments on air was only equalled by their candour 
and diffidence in deducing their results. These researches 
had first their application to the phenomena of combustion 
and animal life, and subsequently to those of vegetation. 
Professor Way then proceeded to explain the composition of 
the atmosphere, and the negative character of the nitrogen it 
contained, as controlling the active chemical nature of the 
oxygen. He stated that the carbonic acid gas mixed with 
the atmosphere, though small in proportion to the oxygen 
and nitrogen, was sufficient in amount to furnish carbon for 
the constitution of the whole of the coal-fields of the globe 
He had nothing to remark, as new, on the watery vapour in 
the atmosphere. The most interesting subject of considera- 
tion at the present time was the occurrence of ammonia and 
of nitric acid in the air, and the mode in which their presence 
could be rendered still more available to the purposes of 
agriculture. He then explained how everything organic 
required by plants could be furnished by these four most 
