Upon the Bespiration of Plants. 127 



should discover some endowed with this property. Finally, 

 water, according to this supposition, is of little or no use in 

 this action, although it is absolutely required for plants, and 

 we are perfectly ignorant of the part it plays. These are 

 some of the considerations which have induced us to under- 

 take the examination of this function in plants ; to which we 

 were also conducted by some facts brought under our notice in 

 agricultural physiology, to which we shall solicit attention in 

 the sequel. 



Up to the present period, experiments upon the respiration 

 of seeds have always been made in the air ; or if made in 

 water, the phenomena which occurred in the liquid have been 

 limited to the explication of what took place in the air ; the 

 gas disengaged in the liquid has not been examined, and con- 

 sequently its proportion has not been determined. What fol- 

 lows is an account of what we have done in relation to 

 this point, and which has yielded very extraordinary results. 

 Our operations were conducted on a great scale, that the ef- 

 fects of the experiments might be more distinctly brought out. 



On this account, we selected for our operations a great 

 ball-shaped bottle with a narrow neck, capable of containing 

 six or eight pints of water. We filled this bottle, and intro- 

 duced forty garden beans of a large size, without any fissure 

 in the husk, or any other defect whatever. To this great 

 bottle we adapted a bent tube, also filled with water, which 

 finally was introduced into a receiver full of the same liquid. 



By this arrangement, the beans were in contact only with 

 water, and with the air which it contained, air which, under 

 the circumstances, could not be removed ; and this was one 

 of those important circumstances which led to all the success 

 of the experiments. The first phenomenon which presented 

 itself was the disengagement of aii'-bubbles, which proceeded 

 from the beans. These bubbles were at first very minute, in- 

 sensibly they increased in size, and in the space of twenty- 

 four hours they were very conspicuous. 



This evolution of gas was itself a very extraordinary cir- 

 cumstance which had not previously been pointed out, and 

 which scarcely seemed to agree with the received ideas upon 



