CHAP, ii.] of Plants. Ingen-Houss and de Saussure. 491 



The theory of nutrition, like a forced plant, needed light that 

 it might recover strength. This light came with the discoveries 

 of Ingen-Houss, and with the mighty strides made by chemistry 

 after 1 760 in the hands of Lavoisier. 



4. THE MODERN THEORY OF NUTRITION FOUNDED BY INGEN- 



Houss AND THEODORE DE SAUSSURE. 1779-1804. 



THE two cardinal points in the doctrine of the nutrition of 

 plants, namely that the leaves are the organs which elaborate 

 the food, and that a large part of the substance of the plant is 

 derived from the atmosphere, were established, as we have seen, 

 by Malpighi and Hales, and employed by them in framing 

 their theory ; it remained to supply a direct and tangible proof 

 of the fact that the green leaves take up a constituent of the 

 atmosphere and apply it to purposes of nutrition. It was evi- 

 dently the want of such direct proof which caused the suc- 

 cessors of the first great physiologists to overlook the import- 

 ance of the propositions thus obtained by deduction, and so 

 to grope their way in the dark with no principle to guide them. 



The discoveries of Priestley, Ingen-Houss and Senebier, and 

 the quantitative determinations of de Saussure in the years be- 

 tween 1774 and 1804, supplied the proof that the green parts 

 of plants, and the leaves therefore especially, take up and 

 decompose a constituent of the air, while they at the same time 

 assimilate the constituents of water and increase in weight in a 

 corresponding degree ; but that this process only goes on 

 copiously and in the normal way, when small quantities of 

 mineral matter are introduced at the same time into the plant 

 through the roots. The discoveries and facts, from which this 

 doctrine proceeded, were those which overthrew the theory of 

 the phlogiston, and from which Lavoisier deduced the prin- 

 ciples of modern chemistry ; the new theory of the nutrition of 

 plants was indeed directly due to Lavoisier's doctrines, and it 

 is necessary therefore to take at least a hasty glance at the 



