The Fixation oe Nitrogen. 
73 
ANALYSIS LXXXIX 
Water-Soluble 
Laboratory 
No. 1024 
Nov. 2, 1910 
Percent 
Calcic sulfate . 18.377 
Calcic chlorid . 18.740 
Magnesic chlorid . 12.030 
Potassic chlorid . 1.882 
Sodic chlorid . 4.550 
Sodic nitrate. 32.997 
Iron and Aluminic oxid . 0.115 
Silicic acid . 0.219 
100.000 
It is no wonder to me that the soil was mealy and barren 
and that our culture experiment showed no living azotobacter. The 
desirability of a series of nitric acid determinations as well as that 
of the total nitrogen in samples of such a soil taken at stated 
intervals is evident, but it has not been and scarcely will ever be 
feasible to prosecute this work in such detail in the field; there are 
other difficulties besides the remoteness of the locality from the 
laboratory. Had I forseen the developments that took place in 
this land in 1910 I could have arranged matters better. This is 
all that I wish to say about this case at the present time. I may 
say something more at a future time. 
Case No. 27 — This is a sample of earth taken from the road¬ 
side near a neighboring town. A vertical face of earth two and 
a half to three feet high left in working the road, as well as the 
flank of the road were decidedly brown and looked moist and oily. 
An irrigating ditch runs about sixty feet north of this point, the 
bottom of which is between four and six feet above it. There was 
no undue amount of moisture either at this point or on the other 
side of the road to indicate leakage from the ditch. The earth is 
a red, gypsiferous and somewhat sandy clay. The sample was 
taken from the surface, but a portion of it may have been more 
than an inch deep. The N 2 0 5 present equalled 1.079 percent of 
the air-dried sample. 
Gases Nos. 28 and 29 —In this investigation only two 
occurrences of nitrates have been met with which must be considered 
as owing their origin to leaching from the soil. How far the 
nitrates in these two cases may have been transported is, as a fact, 
wholly unknown. 
In the case which I have myself seen they probably came from 
the immediately surrounding country, as the line of hills about the 
place is not far away and the occurrence is clearly a surface one. 
These two occurrences are shallow wells, one of them twenty-seven 
