Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/861

Rh contained in the Rain, Snow, Dew, and Fog collected at Liebfrauenberg"; on "The Method of Estimation of Nitric Acid in Presence of Organic Matters"; on "The Quantity of Nitric Acid contained in Rain, Fog, and Dew"; on "The Influence of Vegetable Mold on the Nitrification of Organic Nitrogenous Matter used as Manure"; on the inquiry "Whether Nitrogen is emitted during the Decomposition of Carbonic Acid by Leaves"; on "The Relation between the Volume of Acid decomposed and that of Freed Oxygen"; and many others. "He verified," says M. Tissandier, "the fact, only half seen by his predecessors, that plants fix the carbon contained in the carbonic acid of the air; he also proved definitely that plants decompose water to appropriate its hydrogen to themselves. He determined that plants derive nitrogen from the soil, and that, according to Lavoisier, in the vegetable kingdom as in the laboratory, 'nothing is created, nothing lost.' What is put into the soil as manure appears again in the plant as the crop." "Undoubtedly," says M. Dehérain, "the services which he has rendered to agricultural science by demonstrating the intervention of combined nitrogen in animal or vegetable nutrition are immense. The estimation of the value of rations and of manures rests upon principles that he has laid down; but whatever admiration we may feel for this part of his work, however great may be its practical utility, M. Boussingault has left it unfinished, and has never pointed out how atmospheric nitrogen is drawn into the movement of life."

M. Boussingault's eldest daughter having been married to a son of Jacob Holtzer, proprietor of extensive iron-works on the Loire, his son-in-law built him a spacious laboratory at the shops. Having been driven from Alsace by the Franco-German War, he afterward spent a considerable part of the year at this place, where he made his studies upon iron and steel. M. Boussingault published a memoir on the extraction of oxygen from the atmosphere by means of baryta, and conducted an investigation, with M. Dumas, of the proportions in which the constituents of the atmosphere are mingled. His "Rural Economy" was published in 1844, and an English translation in 1845. Revised and enlarged, and embodying the fruit of years of additional experiments, it was given forth in a new form, in 1861-'64, as "Agronomie, Chimie Agricole, et Physiologic," in three volumes. M. Boussingault was made a grand officer of the Legion of Honor in 1876. He received the Thénard medal of the "Société d'Encouragement" in 1872, and the Copley medal of the Royal Society of England in 1878. These medals he kept very carefully, along with the more modest medal which Bolivar had given him on their parting, and of which he thought more than of either of the others, for it was associated with the bright days of the South American life of his youth.