bigelow] PLANTS WITHOUT SOIL 69 



CHEMICAL TABLETS FOR FEEDING PLANTS GROWING 



WITHOUT SOIL 



BY EDWARD F. BIGELOW, Ph.D. 



Editor of "Nature and Science" in St. Nicholas. Author of "How Nature Study 



should be Taught " 



[Editorial Note. — The experiments described in this paper are so prac- 

 ticable and adaptable to every schoolroom that they deserve to be familiar 

 to every teacher of nature-study. For this reason we have urged the author 

 to re-write the earlier accounts of his experiments and make them more 

 generally available for teachers of nature-study and high-school biology.] 



1 am requested to tell teachers how I use in tablets the chemicals 

 of Sachs' nutrient solution for the artificial feeding of plants. For 

 those not familiar with feeding plants with chemicals I first quote 

 briefly from Professor Sachs :* 



' The complete revolution which rational agriculture and for- 

 estry have experienced through the establishing of the theory of 

 the nutrition of plants, proves how much has been accomplished 

 in this department. It would extend far beyond the scope of this 

 lecture to reproduce even briefly the substance of the literature of 

 the subject. The most significant result of the development of 

 the nutrition theory is met with, however, in the fact that we are 

 now able to rear plants artificially — that we are in a position, 

 with chemically pure water to which we add some few chemically 

 pure salts, to rear artificially highly developed plants as well as the 

 simplest algae (and mutatis mutandis, also fungi) — that from in- 

 conspicuous and often scarcely ponderable quantities of vegetable 

 substance, quantities of it as large as we choose may be produced 

 in this way. 



" Such being the favorable position of affairs, I regard it as the 

 simplest and most instructive method to connect the main points 

 of the theory of nutrition of plants, so far as they concern the 

 food materials, with the description of an experiment in artificial 

 nutrition made with a highly organized plant. I think that in 

 this manner the essential and important points come into view 

 more clearly than with any other mode of exposition. In the year 

 i860 I published the results of experiments which demonstrated 



1 See Lecture XVII, " The Nutritive Materials of Plants," in Profewn- 

 Julius von Sachs' " On the Physiology of Plants." 



