What Is Nitrogen?
Nitrogen is the third of the world’s wonderful and important gases. It is also without color, taste or smell. It will not burn or help other substances to burn and it will not combine easily with any other element. It will unite at a very high degree of heat with magnesium, silica, and other metals. About 7.7 per cent of the weight of the air is nitrogen, so that it is a very important part of the air we breathe and it is absolutely necessary in making all animal and vegetable tissues. When united with hydrogen, it produces ammonia, and with oxygen one of the most important acids—nitric acid. It is found free in the air and is thus easily secured. Nitrogen, while very important to all kinds of life, is known as the quiet gas. It stays quietly by itself unless forced to combine under great power with other things, and, even under those conditions, will combine rarely. We find a good deal of nitrogen in the blood but, while we need the nitrogen which is found in the blood, it does nothing particularly to the blood or the rest of the body. The nitrogen which the body uses is valuable to the body only when found in a compound. This nitrogen which the body needs is secured through vegetable products such as the wheat from which our bread is made, and which are said to secure their nitrogen through the aid of microbes which are able to force the nitrogen of the air into a compound. Some day perhaps we shall know all there is to know about nitrogen, which is the least known of these three wonderful and necessary gases.