PLANT NUTRITION. 33 



plant. The scientist knows that in that seed, however diminutive 

 it may be, there is the embryotic plant. Nature has stored along 

 with that plant the best possible food for it in the endo-sperm of 

 the seed. When that plant starts into activity it finds prepared 

 for it by nature the best food it could have in the form of that 

 endo-sperm, and on that it is nourished, growing by the simple 

 process of adding on cell after cell until it developes the organs 

 by which it may live — its roots to permeate the soil and gather 

 soil food, its leaves hanging pendant in the air to gather air food, 

 and in that cell formation the scientist knows precisely what kind 

 of plant he has — the manner" and conditions of its growth, its 

 organs and their functions, as well as we know the most familiar 

 objects that pass beneath our hands. And one noticeable thing 

 in relation to the structure of a. plant is this, that he who has ex- 

 amined one plant — a wheat plant for instance — and found out its 

 structure, knows absolutely what was the structure of every 

 wheat plant that ever grew and what will be the structure of every 

 wheat plant that ever will grow on the earth's surface. The wheat 

 plant of to-day is in its structure precisely like the wheat plant 

 that grew five thousand years ago, and such as I hope will grow 

 on the soil of Maine five thousand years hence. 



Again, the scientists are all agreed not only as to the structure 

 of the plant but as to the composition of the plant. There is no 

 guess work about it, gentlemen. They know what a plant is made 

 of just as much as the builder of a house knows what that house 

 is built of, and not only do they know of what the plant is made, 

 but they know absolutely the proportions in which the elements 

 that go to make up a plant enter into its composition. Every 

 plant grows by fixed laws made by Omnipotence — law controls it, 

 law made it for a specific purpose, and when the scientist has 

 examined a fully developed plant, it may be an Indian corn plant, 

 and found out how it is made, he knows precisely of what ele- 

 ments and in what proportions every Indian corn plant has been 

 made that ever was made. No plant has been produced by acci- 

 dent, but all have been made by the design of Omnipotence to 

 accomplish certain results, and when we want to make a plant we 

 may be sure that we know just what we have got to have to make 

 it of. More than this, the scientists know in just what form the 

 food of a plant must be presented to it in order that its organs 

 may use it in constructing the plant. 



Passing on to detail, the scientists are agreed that so far as the 

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