LUTHER BURBANK 



these very familiar ones. It would seem as if 

 almost any chemist should be able to manage a 

 simple combination like that. But in point of fact 

 no human chemist knows how to manage it. There 

 are forces to be invoked in effecting that combina- 

 tion of which no chemist has any knowledge. 



Only the chlorophyll grains in the plant leaf 

 have learned the secret, and up to the present they 

 have kept their secret well. 



There are other feats of atom-juggling per- 

 formed with the new compound that are wonderful 

 enough. For example, the sugary compound is 

 ordinarily transformed, in part at least, into 

 granules of starch to be stored away for safe 

 keeping. And this transformation implies a bit of 

 juggling that is by no means easy. But after all it 

 is only the changing of one organic compound into 

 another, and the human chemist can do some 

 extraordinary feats in that line. The really won- 

 derful work done in the leaf laboratory is the 

 original transformation of inorganic materials into 

 an organic compound. 



Of course there are other important stages of 

 the work through which final assimilation is 

 accomplished. To make starch or sugar into 

 protoplasm it is necessary to bring another element 

 into the combination. This element is nitrogen. 

 There must also be incorporated small quantities 



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