shall find this active power exercising its
influence on organised beings, exciting life,
provoking maladies, and determining death.
We shall find Chemistry demanding of ozone
the secret of its combinations with nascent
oxygen; Medicine calling for experiments to
render healthy, spots now infested by
pestilence, and seeking the cause of the most
fearful epidemics, and entreating for remedies
against those evils which it is now powerless
to subdue; lastly, Agriculture gladdened
by a ray of bright hope that the proper
application of this protean agent may increase
the fertility of our fields and gardens. Such
is the important part which the discoverers
of ozone believe that it is destined to play.
They find in it a new manifestation of the
infinite power of the Creator of Worlds, who
with atoms and wheelwork of marvellous
simplicity, produces effects whose majestic
grandeur strikes the imagination with
astonishment, elevates the soul, and fills it
with fervent admiration.

About nineteen years since, Monsieur
Schœnbein, the discoverer of gun–cotton
(which discovery was nevertheless perfectly
prepared by the labours of Monsieurs
Braconnot and Pelouze) busying himself with
the decomposition of water by the voltaic
pile, was struck by the odour given out by
the gaseous fluid so obtained. The following
year, he wrote to Arago, that he had been
astonished at the perfect analogy existing
between the smell which is developed when
ordinary electricity passes from the points of
a conductor through the environing air, and
that which is disengaged when water is
decomposed by a voltaic current. At that
date, Monsieur Schœnbein believed that the
odorous principle was a simple elementary
body, which he named ozone, from the word
oζων, the present participle of the Greek verb,
to smell or to stink. He had not yet ascertained,
though he strongly suspected, the
presence of ozone in the atmosphere. The
circumstance signalised by Monsieur Schœnbein
had already been indicated by Van
Marum, towards the end of the eighteenth
century. He stated that oxygen, resting on
plain water, was not affected by electricity,
except that it acquired a very strong smell,
which seemed evidently to be the smell of
the matter of electricity. The phenomenon
itself had long been forgotten when Monsieur
Schœnbein called attention to it. Monsieur
Williamson proved, before long, that ozone
was not a simple element; that the
decomposition of ozone produces water and oxygen,
and that it, consequently, is hydrogen in a
state of oxydation superior to that of water;
that ozone produced by the battery, consists
of suroxide of hydrogen, and is identical
with ozone produced by the action of the air
on moistened phosphorus. Subsequent
experiments proved beyond a doubt that ozone
is nothing more than oxygen electrified. It
was then proposed to adopt the latter title,
but the shorter expression retained its
ground, having been already adopted by
general usage.

This novel condition of oxygen will probably
be one day turned to account in the
arts; for instance, in the fabrication of sulphuric
acid, without the aid of azotic acid, by
forming the latter acid directly with moist
sulphurous acid gas. Ozone is colourless, of
a penetrating nauseabund smell, and is the
most powerful agent of oxydation known.
It oxydises cold silver and mercury, when
both are moist; but if both the ozone and
the metal are dry, oxydation does not
take place. It has no action on pure water,
although if left in contact with it for several
hours; it is dissolved therein. Ozone rapidly
destroys organic colouring matters, as well as
igneous and albuminous matters. Hence, it
has been suggested to combine it directly, by
compression with water, and so to obtain an
ozonised water, which might be useful in the
bleaching of linen cloth, superseding muriatic
acid, which is particularly destructive of
cellulose. Ozone forms chemical combinations,
of which chloric, bromic, and iodic acids
are the results; it combines directly with
olefiant gas without being decomposed; it
destroys sulphuretted hydrogen. It is rapidly
absorbed by a great number of vegetable and
animal substances, such as albumine, caseine,
fibrine, and blood. It quickly destroys all
oxydable miasms, and is the most powerful
disinfecting agent yet discovered. Happy
indeed has it been for London, during the
last month or two, that ozone has been plentiful
in its vitiated atmosphere.

On the other hand, it has been proved that
electrified oxygen is unfit for respiration,—
that it produces suffocation. This explains
some of the accidents which occur after a
flash of lightning. It is known, in fact, that,
in many cases, persons who have not been
struck, have, nevertheless, been killed by the
suspension of their vital powers through the
presence of an atmosphere impregnated with
sulphurous or phosphorous vapours, owing to
the sudden generation of an extra quantity
of ozone. For the medical man and the
physiologist, one of the most interesting facts
in the history of ozone is the action which
this subtle agent exerts on the animal economy.
It excites the lungs, provokes cough, induces
suffocation, and becomes, when in excess, a
deleterious substance of sufficiently poisonous
energy to occasion death. The air, in its
normal state, contains one ten–thousandth
part of ozone; when the proportion is raised
to one two–thousandth part, it is powerful
enough to kill small animals. What a
mighty, unsuspected means of life or death
does the Ruler of the Universe thus hold in
his hands! A slight increase, or diminution,
of an invisible fluid, is equivalent to the
outpouring of His vials of wrath, or of His
mercy overshadowing us with healing on its
wings.