Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/463

Rh the most dangerous malaria with the utmost impunity, provided a grove intervene between his home and the marsh. This function of trees was known to the Romans, who enacted laws requiring the planting of trees in places made uninhabitable by the diffusion of malaria, and placed groves serving such purposes under the protection of some divinity to insure their protection. It is a rule of the British army in India to select an encampment having a grove between the camp and any low, wet soil.

Finally, trees purify the atmosphere. The process of vegetable nutrition consists in the appropriation by the plant or tree of carbon. This element it receives from the air in the form principally of carbonic acid, and in the process of digestion the oxygen is liberated and again restored to the air, while the carbon becomes fixed as an element of the woody fiber. Man and animals, on the contrary, require oxygen for their nutrition, and the supply is in the air they breathe. Carbon is a waste product of the animal system, and, uniting with the oxygen, is expired as carbonic acid, a powerful animal poison. A slight increase of the normal quantity of carbonic acid in the air renders it poisonous to man, and continued respiration of such air, or a considerable increase of the carbonic acid, will prove fatal. The animal and vegetable world, therefore, complement each other, and the one furnishes the conditions and forces by which the other maintains life and health. "Plants," says Schacht, "imbibe from the air carbonic acid and other gaseous or volatile products exhaled by animals, developed by the natural phenomena of decomposition. On the other hand, the vegetable pours into the atmosphere oxygen, which is taken up by animals and appropriated by them. The tree, by means of its leaves and its young herbaceous twigs, pre-sents a considerable surface for absorption and evaporation; it abstracts the carbon of carbonic acid, and solidifies it in wood fecula, and a multitude of other compounds. The result is that a forest withdraws from the air, by its great absorbent surface, much more gas than meadows or cultivated fields, and exhales proportionally a considerably greater quantity of oxygen. The influence of the forests on the chemical composition of the atmosphere is, in a word, of the highest importance."

In large cities, where animal and vegetable decomposition goes on rapidly during the summer, the atmosphere is, as already stated, at times saturated with deleterious gases. At the period of the day when malaria and mephitic gases are emitted in the greatest quantity and activity, this function of absorption by vegetation is most active and powerful. Carbonic acid, ammoniacal compounds, and other