SUN AND HARVEST OF THE SEA—SCHMITT 297 
The sun’s energy, as you may have heard, is atomic, resulting from 
the transmutation of hydrogen into helium. We know the sun gives 
up energy as hydrogen gas becomes helium. The mechanism is per- 
haps unknown to us. The sun spots are magnetic fields of tremendous 
size and power. Could they be solar cyclotrons splitting the hydrogen 
atom ? 
HYDROPONICS, TERRESTRIAL AND OCHANIC 
The ocean has been described as the world’s largest septic tank, but 
this concept is descriptive of a very small part of the marvelous or- 
ganic mechanism that is the sea. The comparison is based upon the 
activity of bacteria in the septic tank, as well as in the sea, in bringing 
about the reconversion of complex plant, animal, and mineral sub- 
stances for reuse by living organisms. More apt, and permitting bet- 
ter visualization of the processes involved, however, is a comparison 
of the oceans with a sizable hydroponics installation. 
Such an installation was set up on Ascension Island by the Air 
Transport Command of the Army during the war, when both the 
Army and the Navy, by force of circumstances, became hydroponics- 
conscious. On that largely soilless island so strategically placed in 
mid-south Atlantic on the principal military air route from the New 
World to the Old, fresh vegetables were urgently needed in quantity 
for great numbers of men, men in transit and at work keeping other 
men, planes, and supplies flowing in an unending stream to the Afri- 
can and mid-European theaters of war. 
Even if garden produce or the foodstuffs to take its place could 
have been obtained elsewhere, neither the ships nor planes to move it 
were to be had. Ships and planes were too limited in number to be 
diverted from the urgent war missions in other directions. Hydro- 
ponics was the only possible solution of a pressing problem. 
To undertake hydroponics, the soilless culture of plants, or nutri- 
culture, as the more recent publications on the subject have it, on 
any comprehensive scale, a series of tanks or waterproofed troughs 
must be provided to hold the nutrient solution in which the plants 
are grown. Gravity is the cheapest means of circulating the solution 
through the tanks or troughs if the installation is such as to permit 
it, as on Ascension Island. In any case, pumps must be used to areate 
as well as to return the nutrient solution to its original container for 
redistribution, whether replenished or not. In lieu of the soil in 
which the plants naturally grow, support of some kind has to be pro- 
vided. The smaller installations have metal or wooden racks in 
which the plants are embedded in excelsior or sphagnum moss or 
both, so that the roots will hang down into the solution in the tank 
below. In the larger installations the supporting medium may be 
