Remember its name well: it is OXYGEN.
And we must speak of it with respect, for we are talking here of a very great and powerful personage, very superior even to CARBON. If CARBON be one of the great lords of the world, OXYGEN is its king.
There is a certain substance, my dear child, of which many people, especially little girls, do not even know the name, but which yet constitutes of itself alone a good half of everything we are acquainted with in the world. And this substance is the very thing I have just named to you. It is OXYGEN.
Ascend into the air as high as you can go, viz., to forty miles or so from the ground, as we said before; oxygen forms the fifth part of that vast aerial ocean which surrounds the globe on every side. There it is free—is itself—if I may use the expression; it is in the condition of gas; that is to say, it eludes our sight, though there is no difficulty in ascertaining its presence, when one knows how to set about it.
Go down into the depths of the sea. People think they have good reasons for believing this to be two and a half miles deep on an average, which would give a pretty little sum total of tons for its whole weight, as you will be convinced, if you take the trouble of observing the space it covers on a map of the world;—to say nothing of lakes, rivers, streams, the water in the clouds, the water scattered throughout the interior or on the surface of continents, including that with which you wash your face every morning.
Oxygen enters in the proportion of eight-ninths into the composition of this incalculable mass. Eight-ninths, you understand, which is very near being the whole nine; in every nine pounds of water there are eight pounds of oxygen, the remainder being left for another substance, of which we shall have occasion to speak presently, and which is called hydrogen.
The earth on which you tread is full of oxygen. So far as we have penetrated hitherto into the interior of the globe, we have found king Oxygen everywhere: hidden under a thousand forms, connected with a heap of substances, not one of which could exist without him; imprisoned in a thousand combinations, and always ready to resume his natural condition if his prison-house be destroyed. The whole surface of the earth, plains, hills, mountains, towns, deserts, cultivated fields, everything you would look down upon, if on a clear day you could be carried high enough in a balloon to take in the whole earth at a glance:—all that may be considered as an immense reservoir of oxygen, out of which we should see it escaping in gigantic waves, if some superhuman chemist were to take it into his head to put our poor little globe into a retort of the same kind as chemists use among us. To give you an example; the stones of our fine buildings, in which we have already discovered the presence of carbon, are almost half made up of oxygen. In a stone which weighs 100 lbs. there are 48 lbs. of oxygen, and the first chemist who passes by could make them come out of it if he chose, if he were to use a little trouble and skill.
I enumerated to you last time many of the substances in which carbon is to be found; but as regards oxygen we must give up all attempt at making a list; it would comprehend the whole dictionary. Touch whatever lies under your hand—in your room—in the house—wherever you may go—I will almost defy you to put your finger upon anything—metals excepted—which is not crammed with oxygen. Your very body, to conclude with, would become so small a thing, were the oxygen it contains extracted from it, that you would be perfectly amazed.
So when I told you oxygen was king of the world, I did not say too much, did I? Between ourselves too, it is a great misfortune that people live on so complacently in total ignorance of this all-important material, which is connected with everything, which insinuates itself everywhere, which we make use of every instant of our lives, which may almost be said to be in some sort our very selves, since it constitutes three-fourths of our body, but whose name nevertheless would, I am certain, make many pretty little mouths pout, if one were to utter it in a drawing-room.
This is really the case. Many young ladies who are proud to know who Caractacus was, would be ashamed to know anything about oxygen. There is a foolish notion that women have no business with such subjects, probably because children are supposed not to breathe and mothers are not required to watch over them?