A Manual of Inorganic Chemistry; Arranged to Facilitate the Experimental Demonstration of the Facts and Principles of the Science (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 10 COMPOSITION OF AIR. fresh scales were no longer formed. From these red scales Lavoisier obtained, by the method already exhibited (Exp. 5), the element oxygen. The residual air in the jar proved, ou examination, to be unfit for the support of combustion and of animal life; a candle was instantly extinguished by it, as if plunged in water, and small animals, thrust into the gas, died in a few seconds. The gas is, in reality, a second elementary substance, distinguished by marked chemical and physical peculiarities. It is called nitrogen, and under this name will be more completely studied in another chapter. 13. The experiment of Lavoisier not only affords the means of separating the two different gases of which air is composed, but also determines the proportions in which they are mixed in air. If the diminution in bulk which the air in the jar undergoes during the whole progress of the experiment be accurately measured, it will be found that the bulk of the residual gas, the nitrogen, is only four-fifths of the original volume of air. The lost fifth is the oxygen which has combined with the mercury. The air, then, is not an element, but is compound, and its two principal ingredients are the elementary bodies oxygen and nitrogen, mixed in the proportion of four measures of nitrogen to one of oxygen. It is quite possible to prove by synthesis what analysis has thus taught. On putting together four measures of nitrogen and one measure of oxygen, a mixture is obtained, which, except by very refined experiments, is not to be distinguished from pure air. Aqueous vapor is another normal constituent of the actual atmosphere, and small traces of other gases than nitrogen and oxygen are always present in it, as will be set forth hereafter. OXYGEN. 11 CHAPTER IT. OXY ...