The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-12-26
WHAT MAN IS MADE OF.

Thousands of Cubic Feet of Gas and a
 Little Solid Material.
 To build a one hundred-and- fifty pound man only fourteen elementsu al together are needed. Five of them are gases-there is enough gas in a man to fill a gasometer of 3,649 cubic feet-and nine are solids, found in almost any handful of clay you might take up at random-that is to say, carbon, calci- un, phosphorus, iron, sulphur, sodium, potassium, silicon and magnesium. In most people minute quantities of a few other things are found, such as copper, aluminium, manganese, lead, mercury, arsenic and lithium; but these sub- stances are probably always trespass- CTS.
 Far and away the most important ei- ement in flesh and bone is oxygen, and the bulk of that energetic gas which remains tranquilly compressed within us is something marvellous. In a ten stone-ten man the weight of oxygen is no less than 106 pounds, and the natu- ral bulk of it, if it were set free, would be equal to beam of wood one foot square and 1,191 feet-nearly quarter Of a ile-long, or several hundred times the bulk of the body itself. M assured by the gallon it would fill 2O2 thirty six-gallon barrels.
 Even bulkier, though lighter, is the constituent hydrogen. Every man S body contains sufficient of this lightest of all substances to infiate balloon that would lift himself, balloon and tackle In the man, for instance, the bulk of hydrogen is over twenty-four hundred cubic feet--equal to the cubic space of a room ten feet high and if teen and one-half feet square, and the weight of it is a trihe short of thirteen and one-haif pounds.
 Of that inexplicable gas nitrogen there is about half an ounce to each pound of body weight, or approximate ly four and one-haif pounds altogether in one hundred and fifty-eig pound man. It is about twenty times the bulk of the body and by no means likes being cramped up in space of a few cubic inches. This is the most in- 6Tl gas hIOWu. us uulh III tue DUuy IS fifty-eight cubic feet. The reason it is said to be lifeless is that it hates every other element in the world; and, while oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and the oth- CT things, like the Continental powers, cannot live alone, nitrogen, like Eng land, will not, if it can possibly avoid 1t, live in copany. From this trait arises not only all the action of the hu- man brain and the strength of the muscles, but the terrible force of all the great explosives.
 While individually without any ener- gy whatever, when it does chance to enter into union with other things ni- trogen becomes the most energetic sub stance in existence The great explo- sive force of nitro- -glycerine is due to azote. One of the most frightful ex- which does off if the sun shines on it, or if a leaf touches it: and in the hu- man body, it is the breaking down of nitrogen compounds which actually constitutes life Nothing can be alive without nitrogen, itself the type of death. The last of the substances of any bulk in the body is carbon. There is, as nearly as possible, a sack of twenty-one and one-half pounds in a ten-stone man. sufficient to make some sixty-five gross of lead-pencils.- Harmsworth Magazine.