430. Provision cannot have been made for bringing into contact such immense quantities of air and blood, unless important changes are to be produced in both fluids; and accordingly it is found that the air is essentially changed by its contact with the blood, and the blood by its contact with the air.
431. Chemistry has demonstrated the changes effected in the air. Common atmospheric air is a compound body, consisting of pure air and of certain substances diffused in it. Pure air is composed of two gases, azote and oxygen, always combined in fixed proportions. The substances diffused in pure air, and which are in variable quantity, are aqueous vapour and carbonic acid gas. These latter substances form no part of the chemical agents essentially concerned in the process of respiration. The only constituents of the air which are essentially concerned in the process of respiration are the two gases, azote and oxygen, the union of which, in definite proportions, constitutes pure air. But of these two gases each does not perform the same part in the function of respiration, nor is each equally necessary to the support of life.
432. If a living animal be placed in a vessel full of atmospheric air, and if all communication of the atmosphere with the vessel be prevented, the animal in a given time perishes. If an animal be placed in a vessel full of azote, after a given time it equally perishes; but if an animal be placed in a vessel full of oxygen, not only is the function of respiration carried on with far greater energy than in atmospheric air, but the animal lives a much longer time than in the same bulk of the latter fluid. If twenty cubic inches of pure oxygen be capable of sustaining the life of an animal for the space of fourteen minutes, it can support life in the same bulk of atmospheric air only six minutes; and if its respiration be confined to either of these gases, after they have been already respired by another animal of the same species, the former will live only four minutes; that is, not longer than when entirely deprived of air. It follows that the gas which gives to atmospheric air its chief power of sustaining life is oxygen.
433. Accordingly it is proved that no animal, from the lowest to the highest, is capable of sustaining life unless a certain proportion of oxygen be present in the fluid which it respires. Whether it breathe by the skin, by gills, or by lungs, whether the respiratory medium be water or air, the presence of oxygen is alike indispensable. Yet the life of no animal can be sustained by pure oxygen. If azote be not mixed with oxygen, evils are produced in the economy which sooner or later prove fatal. On the other hand, if the proportion of oxygen be diminished beyond a certain point, drowsiness, torpor, and death result. Not oxygen alone, then, but oxygen combined with azote, in the proportion in which nature has united these two fluids to form the atmosphere of the globe, is indispensable to animal existence.