INTRODUCTION. 



The only excuse I have to offer for the manner in which this book presents the 

 subject of crop growing and crop feeding, is the fact that there is so much of 

 ignorance, even among men nominally educated, in regard to the vital processes 

 in plant life. I meet men daily, who have taken college degrees and are in 

 professional life, who still think that the sap rises in the trees in the spring and 

 runs down in the fall; that is about all they know of plant life, and even that 

 little is not true. They have never studied plant life in an intelligent manner, 

 for in all of the old college curriculums botany has been rigorously ignored, or 

 even if attempted, it was only a little spring time study and a brief effort to learn 

 the scientific names by which the plants are called; the main effort was merely 

 to do this, and the result was that the student knew no more about the wonderful 

 life of the plants around him than he did before. Hence educated men, or rather 

 men crammed with the information of the books, fall into all sorts of errors and 

 believe all sorts of old wives' fables about plants. A very intelligent gentleman 

 who is interested in some phosphatic rock mines in this State, told me once that 

 the rock they mined was more soluble than ordinary phosphatic rock because 

 of the heavy forest growth above the deposit, for the sap running out from the 

 roots of the trees in the fall had a solvent effect on the rock below. This man 

 has traveled all over Europe and America, and has a large fund of general infor- 

 mation, and no argument I could use would convince him that no sap runs from the 

 trees in the fall. Late one fall a few years ago a reader of one of our city papers 

 wrote an inquiry to the editor, saying that he had noticed that just before a rain 

 the springs and brooks had swelled, and he wanted to know the reason. The 

 editor, a college bred man, told him that the explanation was perfectly simple, 

 as at that season the sap was running out of the tree roots and raised the springs. 

 He never seemed to think of the real reason, the release of atmospheric pressure 

 just before a rain. I wrote to the paper and told him that there was no such thing 

 as sap running out of the roots of the trees, and entered into some explanation of 

 the processes of plant life. It was amusing after my letter was published, to note 

 the surprise with which it was received. Educated men stopped me on the street 

 and asked if it was really true that the sap does not run out of the roots, and 

 that all plants get the larger part of their fabric from the air and not from the soil. 



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