52 THE PLA^T. 



of the plant gained of these two ingredients, in the 

 flowering and ripening time, three times as much each 

 day as in the preceding period. 



Of the turnip- plant we know with tolerable certain- 

 ty, that from the time when it sends forth a flower- 

 stalk, the constituents of the stalk, as also those of the 

 flowers and the seeds, are for the most part stored up 

 in the root, and are supplied therefrom. It is highly 

 probable that the corn-plant is similarly circumstanced, 

 and that from the flowering to the end of life it is fed, 

 though not exclusively, by the root, which from the 

 flowering time gives out what it had stored up in the 

 preceding period. 



EJSTOP observed that Indian corn plants in flower, 

 taken out of the ground and placed with their roots 

 simply in water, produced ears with ripe seeds ; which 

 proves that the materials serving for the production of 

 seed were already present in the plant at the time of 

 flowering. 



It is an established fact that a corn-plant, if cut off 

 before flowering, relapses into that lower stage of vege- 

 tation of a perennial plant, in which the root receives 

 more organisable matter than it parts with.* 



The proportions of incombustible constituents and 

 of nitrogen severally required by oats and turnips, are 

 remarkably different both in the aggregate and during 

 the various stages of growth. The facts established by 

 Anderson for the turnip, and by Ahrends for the oat, 

 are indeed not sufficiently numerous to warrant us in 

 deducing any positive law of growth for those two 

 plants : "still a few inferences may easily be drawn from 

 them. The quantities of phosphoric acid and nitrogen 

 in the turnip are, at the end of the first year of vegeta- 

 tion, nearly in the proportion of 1 : 1 ; in oats, on the 

 contrary, of 1 : 4, The oat-plant requires to the same 

 quantity of phosphoric acid four times as much nitrogen 



* Buckmann (' Journ. of the Royal Agric. Soc.') sowed wheat on a 

 field in autumn 1849, which was continually cut down in 1850, so that the 

 plants were never allowed to come to flower : they were left in during the 

 winter 1850-51, and yielded an excellent crop in the year 1851. 



