Chemical Influence of the Forest

We know that the air in a close apartment is appreciably affected through the inspiration and expiration of gases by plants growing in it. The same operations are performed on a gigantic scale by the forest, and it has even been supposed that the absorption of carbon, by the rank vegetation of earlier geological periods, occasioned a permanent change in the constitution of the terrestrial atmosphere. To the effects thus produced, are to be added those of the ultimate gaseous decomposition of the vast vegetable mass annually shed by trees, and of their trunks and branches when they fall a prey to time. But the quantity of gases thus abstracted from and restored to the atmosphere is inconsiderable—infinitesimal, one might almost say—in comparison with the ocean of air from which they are drawn and to which they return; and though the exhalations from bogs, and other low grounds covered with decaying vegetable matter, are highly deleterious to human health, yet, in general, the air of the forest is hardly chemically distinguishable from that of the sand plains, and we can as little trace the influence of the woods in the analysis of the atmosphere, as we can prove that the mineral ingredients of land springs sensibly affect the chemistry of the sea. I may, then, properly dismiss the chemical, as I have done the electrical influences of the forest, and treat them both alike, if not as unimportant agencies, at least as quantities of unknown value in our meteorological equation. Our inquiries upon this branch of the subject will accordingly be limited to the thermometrical and hygrometrical influences of the woods.