252 Mrs. Ibbetson on the [April, 



dation, or illustration, of Le Sage's theory of gravity than it has 

 hitherto received from his friends or pupils. It is treading upon 

 a kind of enchanted ground, where we have at all times to main- 

 tain a constant struggle between the imagination and the judg- 

 ment, a contest in which the latter is too apt to be finally 

 vanquished. 



Article II. 



On the Death of Plants. By Mrs. Ibbetson. 



(To the Editors.) 



GENTLEMEN, 



To comment on the duration of the life of a plant, may be 

 supposed, by the generality of readers, to be a matter purely 

 speculative, and to have little connexion with the more useful 

 sciences of gardening and agriculture. But in my late studies, 

 and the experiments to which they have led me, though I have 

 been anxious to elucidate the more difficult question, in what 

 vegetable life consists, and to show its analogy to animal life ; 

 yet my chief aim has been to prove how very tenacious plants 

 are of life, how slowly they quit that beautiful form which nature 

 has bestowed on them, and how long they are in reassuming that 

 state of agglutinated matter to which they are reduced by fer- 

 mentation and decomposition, and from which they appear 

 originally to proceed. I hope also to be able to show, of what 

 extreme consequence this subject is to agriculture and garden- 

 ing, how many very important and serious mistakes at present 

 exist, and how much both those arts would be benefitted by a 

 more clear insight into the subject. 



It is comparatively easy to ascertain all that happens after the 

 plants are killed and immersed in the earth : we know the com- 

 mencement of the process and its termination, and hence we too 

 hastily conclude that on this account we must necessarily be 

 acquainted with the whole of the operation. But here we have 

 formed too hasty a conclusion. It is of extreme consequence 

 in agriculture to know, whether burying a plant will kill it? 

 Whether vegetables, when placed in the earth, will make manure 

 at all ? That is, whether any process which they pass through 

 when immersed in the soil will bring them back to the sub- 

 stance of mould ; and if it will, how long time is requisite for 

 that process ? It is also important to be well informed how the 

 earth acts on a dying plant. We know that vegetables require 

 manure, but we are in the habit of employing what has not been 

 clearly proved to be capable of affording them any nutriment. 

 There are many contradictions in our opinions and practice in 

 this respect '. when our vegetables are taken out of the ground 



