CIRCULATION IN SAP. 159 



the fertilizer manufacturers who feel so disposed may go 

 there with all the money they are willing to spend in lobby- 

 ing, and find in the end that they have made fools of them- 

 selves, wasted their money, and 'that the farmers have got 

 such a law as they want, and will control it. 



Adjourned to two o'clock. 



Afternoon Session. 



The meeting was called to order at two o'clock, Hon. 

 James F. C. Hyde, of Newton, in the chair. Col. William 

 S. Clark, President of the ISIassachusetts Agricultural Col- 

 lege, read the following paper on 



THE CmCULATION OF SAP IN PLANTS. 



The prime business of agriculture is to produce desirable 

 plants in sufficient abundance, of the best quality and with 

 the greatest economy. To do this with the highest success 

 and with that rational intelligence which is generally supposed 

 to be a distinguishing characteristic of the lords of creation, 

 demands a knowledge of vegetable anatomy and physiology 

 far more intimate and thorough than has ever yet been 

 attained. To a superficial observer it might seem very easy 

 to investigate, with the aid of all the appliances of modern 

 science, such apparently simple and familiar phenomena as 

 the germination of a little seed and the growth of a common 

 tree. But the difficulties to be overcome in physiological 

 researches, whether vegetable or animal, are" so 'numerous 

 and peculiar that real progress in knowledge is exceedingly 

 slow. 



In the year 1650, Dr. William Harvey, of England, the cel- 

 ebrated discoverer of the circulation of the blood, announced 

 as the result of his studies in embryology that every living 

 being originated from an egg. He had previously been phy- 

 sician to King Charles I., and when after the battle of Edge- 

 hill, in 1642, the royal party retired to Oxford, he is reported 

 as having spent much time in observing the development of the 

 embryo in eggs which were kept for the purpose under a sit- 

 ting hen, in the college chamber of a friend. Since that time, 



