REPETITION OF EXPERIMENTS REPORTED BY JAMES WOODHOUSE IN 1808 RELATIVE TO THE PRODUCTION OF AMMONIA* KATHARINE S. LOVE AND P. H. EMMETT FERTUI~ER AND FIXED NITROGEN INVESTIGATIONS, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF A~RIC~LTURE, WASHINGTON, D. C. In aletter of September 15, l;SOS, written by James Woodhouse, Professor of Chemistry a t the University of Pennsylvania, to Nicholson's Journal of Natural Philosophy, a general description of his experiment in which ammonia was obtained by adding water to a mixture of soot and "pearlash" that had been heated in air to a high temperature is given. In the following semi-quantitative experiments an attempt has been made to ascertain whether the ammonia obtained by him was produced by the reaction of water with some nitrogen compounds formed during the heating of the soot and "pearlash" in air or was due to impurities in his raw materials. In at least three respects, however, the present attempted repetitions of his work may differ from his original experiment. 1. I n the present work the raw matehls used were willow charcoal, C.P. KOH, and C.P. KzC03. The charcoal was found to contain not JAMTS \V
