634 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVII. No. 694 



ferent authors may be assigned on title pages. 

 If ' the bureau really has faith in its utter- 

 ances, why will it not rise to the stature of 

 serious work and get out upon some field with 

 appliances which will enable it to extract from 

 one or more of its highly unproductive soils the 

 toxic substances about which it has written 

 so much and yet in reality accomplished 

 almost nothing? This the farmers of the 

 country have a right to demand, or else that 

 it shall turn at once its energies into chan- 

 nels which have more of promise. 



Since writing the above there has been 

 issued from the bureau (November 6) another 

 bulletin. No. 47, along the same line, under 

 the title " Certain Organic Constituents of 

 Soils in Eelation to Soil Fertility " which, not 

 to be misleading, and to be true to the sub- 

 ject-matter presented as well as to the facts 

 as known with which the bulletin deals, should 

 read Certain Organic Constituents in Plants 

 in a PossiUe Belation tO' Soil Fertility; for 

 although it is stated (p. 9) that " The toxic 

 properties of soils have been demonstrated and 

 the existence of toxic bodies is a reality with 

 which it is necessary to deal in future soil 

 studies on the fertility and infertility of our 

 agricultural lands," and further along it says 

 (p. 12) : " It has been demonstrated by the 

 studies described in this bulletin that sub- 

 stances commonly used as fertilizers in agri- 

 cultural practise have in addition to their 

 function as plant nutrients a well-defined 

 power to overcome and actually destroy toxic 

 bodies," yet the facts are nothing which the 

 bureau has yet published can be considered 

 strictly as demonstrating either of these 

 propositions even under the strained and 

 highly abnormal conditions of the experiment 

 cited, not to say what does occur under nor- 

 mal field conditions. 



In these experiments, as heretofore, ten 

 wheat seedlings are grown but six to thirteen 

 days in solutions contained in 250-c.c. salt 

 bottles, depending for nourishment upon ma- 

 terials stored in the seed, while the chief cri- 

 teria for differences in growth have been the 

 very misleading and indecisive quantities of 

 transpiration or of green weights, whereas, in 



such experiments as these, it is perfectly feas- 

 ible to determine precisely the increase in dry 

 weight, both in tops and roots, and thus ob- 

 tain quantities which can not be misleading, 

 as those used are known to be, and so acknowl- 

 edged at page 15 of the bulletin. Moreover, 

 in each of the experiments cited with tyrosine, 

 choline, piperidine, quinone, vanillin, cumarin, 

 cinnamic acid, esculin and heliotropine it is 

 quite as rational to assume as another, among 

 several alternative hypotheses, that the real 

 effect of these substances, instead of being in 

 any sense toxic to the wheat plants, has been 

 to simply diminish the rate at which the 

 stored nourishment in the seed was rendered 

 soluble and available to the growing seedlings. 

 Indeed, the coating of the roots in several of 

 the cases, as cited in the bulletin, suggests 

 that the substance of the kernels may have 

 been markedly affected in such a way as to 

 have retarded its transformation into avail- 

 able plant food, and the failure of the roots 

 to develop into the solution may quite as well 

 have been due to a lack of dissemination of 

 plant food, so that there was little to stimulate 

 root development in those cases, for it is a 

 fact well established by observation in the 

 field that the roots of crops develop most 

 strongly into portions of the soil where nutri- 

 ments are most abundant and available. It 

 would clearly be a waste of energy and of food 

 materials for a plant to develop its roots into 

 a non-nutritive solution and these experiments 

 were never continued long enough to have de- 

 veloped a stress for water. It is worthy of 

 note in this connection that often there was 

 associated with the substances used a relatively 

 less root development than of top if we may 

 judge by the appearances of the illustrations, 

 supplemented by definite statements to this 

 efl^ect in the text. It is greatly to be regretted 

 that where so much pains has been taken to 

 accumulate data and where the dry weights of 

 the roots and of the tops could with ease and 

 exactness have been determined, it was not 

 done, as the extra time, expense and labor are 

 not worth considering in view of the increased 

 value of the data which would have resulted. 

 We speak advisedly on this point because we 

 have done a large amount of work along the 



