Abstract
Joseph Priestley (1) placed sprigs of mint under a belljar containing an atmosphere which had become laden with carbon dioxide from animal respiration, and showed that the air lost a large part of its carbon dioxide and gained “dephlogisticated air” or oxygen. Closely following this demonstration, Ingen-housz (2) showed that green plants evolved oxygen only when in light. Soon Senebier (3), Theodore de Saussure (4), Boussingault (5), and later Dutrochet (6) announced that carbon dioxide was absorbed and oxygen evolved only by the green parts of the plants, and that the volume of the carbon dioxide absorbed was equal to the volume of the oxygen evolved. (The process of respiration was neglected in this work.) Bonnier and Mangin (7) used four methods in studying the ratio of carbon dioxide absorbed to the oxygen evolved or the “photosynthetic quotient.” They expressed their results in the form of O2/CO2 and found a...
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