12 INTRODUCTION. 



This same general ignorance in regard to plant life is the cause of so many 

 otherwise intelligent men believing that one plant can be suddenly transformed 

 into an entirely different one. That wheat will change to chess or cheat. Men 

 who have studied the life history of vegetation know the utter absurdity of this 

 notion, but it is so firmly fixed in the minds of many intelligent men that it is 

 perfectly useless to argue with them. They have never been taught accuracy of 

 observation in their youth, and hence jump to conclusions that are not warranted 

 by the facts. Some months ago a farmer in this State wrote me a letter, asking 

 if there was any premium offered by the Agricultural Department of the State for 

 the positive proof that wheat would turn to cheat. I answered that there was no 

 such offer, and I knew there was no such proof. A friend of mine, a leading 

 lawyer of the writer's neighborhood, then wrote to me that I had treated his friend 

 rather curtly, for he knew that he had the positive proof, and he would send it to 

 me. Accordingly a few days after I received a package containing a well grown 

 plant of cheat with numerous wheat grains adhering to the tips of the rootlets. 

 I wrote to the lawyer that if this was what he called proof, he would have to 

 learn to sift evidence better or his reputation as a lawyer would suffer. The fact 

 that dead wheat grains were attached to the feeding tips of the rootlets of the 

 cheat, was simply proof that the wheat decayed and the roots of the cheat found 

 the grains and were feeding on them. If the cheat had really germinated from the 

 wheat, the grains would never have been found on the place where the absorptive 

 root hairs were foraging for food, but would have been right up where they 

 started from, and that what he regarded as positive proof of the transformation 

 of wheat into cheat was, on the other hand, a positive proof that no such change 

 had taken place, for the roots were simply seeking food, and the weather con- 

 ditions that killed the wheat were just the kind that were favorable to the 

 development of the hardy cheat, which never winter kills. It is with the hope 

 that a study in a simple manner of some of the processes of plant life will help to 

 banish superstitions, and will be the means of some of our readers getting a better 

 understanding of the reasons that underlie the culture of our crops, and the sup- 

 plying of them with food. We have made the effort to avoid, as far as possible, 

 language that might confuse the unlearned, and to clothe facts in the every day 

 language of the farm so far as possible. 



It will be noticed that we state that 95 per cent, or more of every plant comes 

 from the air, and not from the soil, and we endeavor to explain how the plant gets 

 the material from the air. But to see in a practical way how much of a plant 

 comes from the air, take a good sized corn stalk and weigh it. Now cut it up and 

 dry it thoroughly. Not merely air-dry, but dry it as a chemist would dry it in 

 his dry bath. Now weigh it again, and you find that it contained a great deal 

 of water. Now burn it carefully and completely, till you have only white ashes 

 left. You will find that these weigh but a trifle as compared with the great corn 

 plant. And yet that little handful of ashes contains all the plant got from the 

 soil except the nitrogen, and that the soil originally got from the air. The 

 mineral matters, or ash elements, are what you have left in the ashes. The rest 

 was carbon and water, and it has gone off in the shape in which the plant originally 

 got it, as carbonic acid, to feed other plants and make other structures, for there is 

 no destruction in nature. The same old materials are being used over and over 



