i84 An American Fruit-Farm 



on ages ago. There is nothing new in the process. 

 Our trees, vines, orchards, and plants are growing 

 because plant-food, deposited in former times, 

 is now soluble and available. The plant feeds as 

 it were at both ends — ^top and bottom, root and 

 branch. We speak of the leaves as the plant's 

 lungs; of the roots, as its stomach, — ^rather strong 

 metaphors. The leaf is an arrangement of cells 

 which both receive and give out gas. Some 

 plants are "air-feeders," — not many however; the 

 mistletoe, commonly called an air-plant, sending 

 quasi-rootlets into the bark of the tree and so 

 feeding on the sap. Yet we know that a common 

 and trustworthy test of tree-health is foliage. An 

 abundant, well colored foliage means a healthy tree. 

 If we submerge the foliage in water or in a poison- 

 ous gas, the leaves, and usually the tree, die. We 

 have starved the tree by cutting off its supply of 

 food by means of gas or water. In like manner we 

 starve the tree were we to submerge the roots. 

 Cut them off from soluble food and they, as well 

 as the tree, perish. Pack the roots in barnyard 

 manure, or ashes, or nitrate of soda, or iron filings, 

 or olive oil, or old clothes, and we starve the tree. 

 Fill a man's stomach with mustard, or roast beef, 

 or plum duff, or any like morsel of like solubility 

 for infantile digestion, and we starve the body, 

 though the process is somewhat accelerated "by 

 other symptoms setting in." Many a tree and 

 vine on the plantation dies of starvation through 

 "auto-intoxication," which, translated, means 



