8 MK. NICHOLS' ADDEESS. 



and eacli variety calls for its appropriate nutriment, and if nature 

 docs not supply it sufficiently in the soil, or if you, gentlemen, do 

 not step in and furnish it, it famishes and dies. There is as much 

 propriety in saying, when we observe a stalk of corn struggling for 

 existence in an impoverished soil, that it is starving to death, as 

 there is in saying that an animal famishes, when food is withheld. 

 Let us observe still further the striking analogy between plant life 

 and animal life. I have said that both have their appropriate, 

 chosen food. If we place before a favorite horse, or ox, such forms 

 of food as man requires, and withhold hay and grain, their appropri- 

 ate food, they will ultimately perish. Thus it is with vegetables. 

 If you plant peas, or beans, upon a field where there is no trace of 

 lime in the soil, although it may be rich in potash and phosphoric 

 acid, upon which other plants would live and thrive, they will as 

 certainly famish as though you sowed them in the granite quarries 

 of Quincy, or among the glaciers of the Alps. To attempt to feed 

 the different varieties of plants upon the dust atoms of a single 

 kind of rock, would be as absurd as to gather the different races 

 of men together, and endeavor to sustain them upon the watery 

 fruits of the tropics. While the seething negro would satiate his 

 appetite, and grow lusty, upon the water-melon and the banana, 

 the greasy Esquimaux would cry aloud for his train oil and blubber, 

 and if it was withheld, he would probably die from the cravings of 

 unappeased hunger. A plant is like an infant, as respects the pre- 

 paration of its food. It has no teeth to masticate, no salivary 

 glands to pour out diluting fluids, to render digestible its rocky aH- 

 ment, and yet it can receive it only in a liquid, soluble form. Its 

 mouths are microscopic, and nothing not minutely subdivided can 

 pass their portals. 



You, gentlemen, are men nurses, laboring among your plant 

 children, pulverizing and moistening their food, (unless the clouds 

 aid you sufficiently with their misty treasures) even as the female 

 nurse within the precincts of the children's nursery, is busily em- 

 ployed in preparing and rendering easily digestible that which the 

 appetite of her little troop so urgently demands. 



Nature does much by the activity of those forces already alluded 

 to, to prepare the inorganic food of vegetables. Although the rocks 

 have crumbled into powder of varied fineness, and the mass of this 



