STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 391 



salts, where they are embedded into their electro-chemical batteries 

 that transform them into new structure, building life-cells, lifting 

 higher its lung-leaves and blossoms that draw from and exhale upon 

 the air nitrogen, oxygen and inter-linking carbonic acid. These with 

 hydrogen and other gases are constantly generating, acting and re- 

 acting in nature's chemical laboratories, and by election and selection 

 are ever passing through processes eluding our arts, to be fitted for 

 construction in new forms of life. Take, for instance, nitrogen that 

 enters largely into the constituency of plants; one of them is ammo- 

 nia, and ammonia is a product of the decay of manures and other 

 fermenting and putrifying substances. But how nauseating and sick- 

 ening are these gases when just arising from the rotten garbage! 

 When the plant roots have found the filthy stuff and carried its sup- 

 porting acids upward, reconstructed, refined, vitalized, sun-fused and 

 electrified, a bloom with fragrance and beauty, they are the same 

 gases, but how changed, how inspiring to all sentient things! Now 

 the higher organic creation can breathe such air and live. Thus trees 

 not only fit the oxydizing salts in the soil, and thence their gases, for 

 life-support, but serve to neutralize the breeding of malarious atmos- 

 pheres. 



DANGEROUS DISEASES. 



Our State Boards of Health over all the country, maintain that 

 Diphtheria, Scarletina, and other germ diseases are traceable to bad 

 sewerage, barnyard washings in the water, and other unclean en- 

 vironment; and they lecommend better drainage and the burning of 

 all possible putrifications in the way. It is wise, but what health 

 committee or legislation enforces nature's tree-hygiene? The more 

 roots we can get into decaying matter, the safer for all things that 

 live. Cattle men are studying how to eradicate pluro-pneumonia 

 from their herds. Kill them oft' is the order; but this does not re- 

 move the cause. So long as they feed around malarial sloughs, on 

 treeless plains swept by poisoned simoons, compelled to drink water 

 full of deadly miasma and breathe feted air, subject to excessive heat 

 or chill, microbic germs, latent in their organism, or imbibed by their 

 surroundings, will be quickened into activity, preying upon their lungs 

 and introducing consumption among the people. More forests for the 

 herding cattle and colts with ample drainage of vacterian pools— this 

 should be and must be the governmental order everywhere enforced. 

 To neglect this duty is the unpardonable sin of agriculture. To 

 procrastinate is the robbery of soil and atmospheric nutriment. To 



