72 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



pulp instead of tlie original poisonous fruit of ancient Media, 

 full of prussic acid ; would you fill your cellars with potatoes 

 and turnips, beets and cabbages, without which a farmer's 

 dinner is impossible, you must cultivate the vegetable. Would 

 you regale your eye with a hundred varieties of dahlias, roses, 

 pinks and verbenas ; would you have your cottage ensconced in 

 trees, your lawns green and bordered by hedges, and your farm 

 a picturesque landscape, you must cultivate the vegetable. 

 Aye, what comfort does not come from the vegetable ? The 

 clothing we wear, the houses we live in, the winter fire we 

 enjoy, the newspapers we read, the tobacco we smoke, the 

 opium we revel in, the tea and coffee we infuse, the liquors we 

 ferment, all come from the vegetable, and if there be any other 

 good, if we cultivate the vegetable, we may sell and buy. 



To know how to do this requires a most intimate knowledge 

 of the anatomy of plants. For the farmer has not only to con- 

 tend with the diseases of plants, as the physician does with the 

 diseases of man, but he has to administer proper food ; not only 

 has he to produce a healthy, natural growth, but as in the 

 cabbage, turnip, carrot and potato, to produce by his treatment 

 a change in the character and habits. 



The whole structure of the plant is very curious, complicated 

 and interesting. In the root each one of the thousands of little 

 radicles is terminated by a bundle (spongiole) of little hollow 

 hairs, which operate like a sponge on the fluid that passes over 

 them. This is the way the plant takes its food ; it has no 

 organs of locomotion by which to go and seek, no claws to 

 catch, no teeth to tear in pieces and masticate ; but the earth 

 all around the stem is filled with spongioles, and when the 

 showers fall upon the surface they dissolve the nutrient solids, 

 and percolating downward are sucked into the organs of the 

 plant. Many think that these little spongioles have an instinc- 

 tive choice in the selection of food, taking up those solutions 

 and those only which the plant needs. As a general statement 

 it is true, that the same species of plants in different situations 

 will contain — as found by analysis — the same ingredients in the 

 same proportion ; it is true, also, that when grown upon the 

 same soil, the ashes of turnips will contain one twenty-fifth 

 soda, while oats will have none. It is also true that when the 

 root is cut off and the fresh cut surface inserted in any solution, 



