CORN growers' association. ^ 



materials into certain finished products. His raw materials are the car- 

 bonic acid of the air and the water and mineral substances from the 

 earth, and his finished product is starch, oil and protein. These are the 

 principal compounds which occur in the kernel of corn and for which 

 the farmer works from seed-time to harvest. Nature is a wonderful 

 chemist and works in a very small laboratory, but she has many of 

 them. These laboratories are the plant cells ; they are in the stems, the 

 leaves and the grain. The carbon, the hydrogen, the oxygen, those 

 elements of which the plant needs most, together with nitrogen, phos-. 

 phoric acid and potash are transformed into compounds totally unlike 

 those originally fed into the machine. The carbon is breathed in by the 

 leaf cell as carbonic acid gas, and the water comes up from the ground 

 and brings with it the mineral constituents. If you were to look at the 

 leaf of the corn plant under a microscope, those particles of green which 

 make the whole appear green to the eye would become separated one 

 from another. These green "corpuscles" called chlorophyll corpuscles, 

 are the places wherein the carbonic acid gas is split up and where starch 

 first appears. But starch cannot pass through the walls of these small 

 cells and reach the ear of corn, and therefore Nature changes it into a 

 compound near akin to sugar which will dissolve in the juices of the 

 plant and be carried from the leaf to the grain. Likewise those com- 

 pounds of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, known as proteids, 

 which are likewise formed in the" leaf cells are transformed into soluble 

 compounds and journey along with the sugar-like bodies to the kernel, 

 where they are transformed into proteid matter again. The sap of a 

 plant is a water solution of these sugar-like and nitrogen-containing 

 materials together with certain other things and it is by means of the 

 sap-flow that the products formed in one part of a plant are carried to 

 that part from which they are harvested. 



If you were to take a grain of corn and soak it in hot water for 

 about thirty minutes, then split it, you would see certain marked differ- 

 ences in its different parts which are represented in Figure i. 



It can be seen that a large part of the corn is relatively pure starch, 

 another part is rich in proteid matter, and yet another part contains much 

 oil. The following table shows whereabouts in this corn kernel the 

 finished products of the farmer's machine are contained. 



