Читать книгу Earth and Sky Every Child Should Know - Julia Ellen Rogers - Страница 9

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"Baking day" is a great institution in the comfortable farm life of the American people. The big range oven is not allowed to grow cold until rows of pies adorn the pantry shelves, and cakes, tarts, and generous loaves of bread are added to the store. Cookies, perhaps, and a big pan full of crisp, brown doughnuts often crown the day's work. No gallery of art treasures will ever charm the grown-up boys and girls as those pantry shelves charmed the bright-eyed, hungry children, who were allowed to survey the treasure-house, and sample its good things while they were still warm.

You could count a dozen different kinds of cakes and pies, rolls and cookies on those pantry shelves, yet several of them were made out of the same dough. Instead of a loaf of bread, mother could make two or three kinds of coffee cake, or cinnamon rolls, or currant buns, or Parker-House rolls. Even the pastry, which made the pies and tarts, was not so different from the bread dough, for each was made of flour, and contained, besides the salt, "shortening," which was butter or lard. Sugar was used in everything, from the bread, which had a table-spoonful, to the cookies, which were finished with a sifting of sugar on top.

How much of the food we eat is made of a very few staple foodstuffs—starch, sugar, fats! So in the wonderful earth and all that grows out of it and lives upon it. Only seventy different elements have been discovered, counting, besides the earth, the water and the air, and even the strange wandering bodies, called meteorites, that fall upon the earth out of the sky. Like the flour in the different cakes and pies, the element carbon is found in abundance and in strangely different combinations. As a gas, in combination with oxygen, it is breathed out of our lungs, and out of chimneys where coal and wood are burned. It forms a large part of the framework of trees and other plants, and remains as charcoal when the wood is slowly burned under a close covering. There is a good proportion of carbon in animal bodies, in the bones as well as the soft parts, and carbon is plentiful in the mineral substances of the earth.

The chemist is the man who has determined for us the existence and the distribution of the seventy elements. He finds them in the solid substances of the globe and in the water that covers four-fifths of its surface; in the atmosphere that covers sea and land, and in all the living forms of plants and animals that live in the seas and on the land. By means of an instrument called the spectroscope, the heavenly bodies are proved to be made of the same substances that are found in the rocks. The sun tells what it is made of, and one proof that the earth is a child of the sun is in the fact that the same elements are found in the substance of both.

Of the seventy elements, the most important are these: Oxygen, silicon, aluminum, iron, manganese, calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, carbon, hydrogen, phosphorus, sulphur, chlorine, nitrogen.

Oxygen is the most plentiful and the most important element. One-fifth of the air we breathe is oxygen; one-third of the water we drink. The rock foundations of the earth are nearly one-half oxygen. No fire can burn, no plant or animal can grow, or even decay after it dies, unless oxygen is present and takes an active part in each process. Strangely enough, this wonderful element is invisible. We open a window, and pure air, rich in oxygen, comes in and takes the place of the bad air but we cannot see the change. Water we see, but if the oxygen and the hydrogen which compose the colourless liquid were separated, each would become at once an invisible gas. The oxygen of solid rocks exists only in combination with other elements.

Silicon is the element which, united with oxygen, makes the rock called quartz. On the seashore the children are busy with their pails and shovels digging in the white, clean sand. These grains are of quartz—fine crystals of a rock which forms nearly three-quarters of the solid earth's substance. Not only in rocks, but out here in the garden, the soil is full of particles of sand. You cannot get away from it.

Aluminum is a light, bluish-white metal which we know best in expensive cooking utensils. It is more abundant even than iron, but processes of extracting it from the clay are still expensive. It is oftenest found in combination with oxygen and silicon. While nearly one-tenth of the earth's crust is composed of the metal aluminum, four-fifths and more is composed of the minerals called silicates of aluminum—oxygen, silicon, and aluminum in various combinations. It is more plentiful than any other substance in rocks and in the clays and ordinary soils, which are the finely ground particles of rock material.

Iron is one of the commonest of elements. We know it by its red colour. A rusty nail is covered with oxide of iron, a combination which is readily formed wherever iron is exposed to the action of water or air. You have seen yellowish or red streaks in clefts of the rocks. This shows where water has dissolved out the iron and formed the oxide. The red colour of New Jersey soil is due to the iron it contains. Indeed, the whole earth's crust is rich in iron which the water easily dissolves. The roots of plants take up quantities of iron in solution and this mounts to the blossoms, leaves, and fruit. The red or yellow colour of autumn leaves, of apples, of strawberries, of tulips, and of roses, is produced by iron. The rosy cheeks of children are due to iron in the food they eat and in the water they drink. The doctor but follows the suggestion of nature when he gives a pale and listless person a tonic of iron to make his blood red.

Iron is rarely found free, but it forms about five per cent. of the crust of the earth, and it is believed to form at least one-fifth of the unknown centre of the earth, the bulk of the globe, the weight of which we know, but concerning the substance of which we can say little that is positive.

Manganese is not a conspicuous element, but is found united with oxygen in purplish or black streaks on the sides of rocks. It is somewhat like iron, but much less common.

Calcium is the element that is the foundation of limestones. The skeletons and shells of animals are made of calcite, a common mineral formed by the uniting of carbon, oxygen, and calcium. Marbles are, perhaps, the most permanent form of the limestone rocks. "Hard" water has filtered through rocks containing calcite, and absorbed particles of this mineral. From water thus impregnated, all animal life on the earth obtains its bone-building and shell-building materials.

Carbon forms a large part of the tissues of plants and animals, and in the remains of these it is chiefly found in the earth's crust. When these burn or decay, the carbon remains as charcoal or escapes to the air in union with oxygen as the well known carbonic acid gas. This is one of the most important foods of plants. Joined with calcium it forms the mineral calcite, or carbonate of lime.

Hydrogen is one of the two gases that unite to form water. Oxygen is the other. Many kinds of rock contain a considerable amount of water. Surface water sinks into porous soils and rocks, and accumulates in pockets and veins which feed springs, and are the reserve water supply that keeps our rivers flowing, even through dry weather. More water is held by absorption in the earth's solid crust than in all the oceans and seas and great lakes.

Hydrogen, combined with carbon, occurs in solid rocks where the remains of plants and animals have slowly decayed. From such processes the so-called hydrocarbons, rock oil and natural gas, have accumulated. When such decay goes on above ground, these valuable products escape into the air. Marsh gas, whose feeble flame above decaying vegetation is the will-o'-the-wisp of swamps, is an example.

Magnesium, potassium, and sodium are found in equal quantities in the earth's crust, but never free. In union with chlorine, each forms a soluble salt, and is thus found in water. Common salt, chloride of sodium, is the most abundant of these. Water dissolves salt out of the rocks, and carries it into the sea. Clouds that rise by the evaporation of ocean water leave the salt behind, hence the seas are becoming more and more salty, for the rivers carry salt to the oceans, which hold fast all they get.

Phosphorus is an element found united with oxygen in the tissues of both plants and animals. It is most abundant in bones. Rocks containing fossil bones are rich in lime phosphates, which are important commercial fertilizers for enriching the soil. Beds of these rocks are found and mined in South Carolina and elsewhere.

Sulphur is well known as a yellow powder found most plentifully in rocks that are near volcanoes. It is a needed element in plant and animal bodies. It occurs in rocks, united with many different elements. In union with oxygen and a metal it forms the group of minerals called sulphates. In union with iron it forms sulphide of iron. The "fool's gold" which Captain John Smith's colonists found in the sand at Jamestown, was this worthless iron pyrites.

Chlorine is a greenish, yellow gas, very heavy, and dangerous to inhale. If it gets into the lungs, it settles into the lowest levels, and one must stand on one's head to get it out. As an element of the earth's crust it is not very plentiful, but it is a part of all the chlorides of sodium, magnesium, and potassium. In salt, it forms two per cent. of the sea water. It is much less abundant in the rocks.

To these elements we might add nitrogen, that invisible gas which forms nearly four-fifths of our atmosphere, and is a most important element of plant food in the soil. Most of the seventy elements are very rare. Many are metals, like gold and iron and silver. Some are not metals. Some are solid. A few are liquid, like the metal mercury, and several are gaseous. Some are free and pure, and show no disposition to unite with others. Nuggets of gold are examples of this. Some exist only in union with other elements. This is the common rule among the elements. Changes are constantly going on. The elements are constantly abandoning old partnerships and forming new ones. Growth and decay of plant and animal life are but parts of the great programme of constant change which is going on and has been in progress since the world began.