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Gallegico Directory 04
Page 06
There were three passages there, called respectively the Casson, near the left bank; the Dos Ananas, in the centre; and the channel da Terra Preta, which we followed, on the right. At Lua Nova, the end of the Mangabel rapid, the river turned in a sweeping curve to the north, the rocks getting fewer and fewer until eventually the river became quite clear of them, with only high hills along both banks. Lua Nova was a little settlement of five houses and a shed, some of them whitewashed, with doors and windows painted green. A small plantation of Indian corn, sugar-cane, and _mandioca_ had been made, the soil being extremely fertile at that spot. We enjoyed a magnificent view to the west and north-north-west, the river there forming an elbow.
That there is a close likeness between all these bodies is obvious from the fact that when any of them is strongly heated, or allowed to putrefy, it gives off the same sort of disagreeable smell; and careful chemical analysis has shown that they are, in fact, all composed of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, combined in very nearly the same proportions. Indeed, charcoal, which is impure carbon, might be obtained by strongly heating either a handful of corn, or a piece of fowl's flesh, in a vessel from which the air is excluded so as to keep the corn or the flesh from burning. And if the vessel were a still, so that the products of this destructive distillation, as it is called, could be condensed and collected, we should find water and ammonia, in some shape or other, in the receiver. Now ammonia is a compound of the elementary bodies, nitrogen and hydrogen; therefore both nitrogen and hydrogen must have been contained in the bodies from which it is derived.
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