Food of Plants, and its Transformation. 397 



Art. II. On the Food of Plants, and its Transformation. By 

 Alexander Forsyth. 



There is certainly nothing so essentially necessary for a gardener to be ac- 

 quainted with, as the nature of the materials of which vegetables are built ; 

 for, whether he thinks it or not, the multiplying of vegetable tissue is a far 

 greater and more difficult task to perform than the after-management of it. 



J)r. Lindley tells us, in his Inlroduction to Botany, p. I., that " the che- 

 mical basis of the elementary organs has been found to be oxygen, hydrogen, 

 and carbon, with occasionally a little nitrogen or azote, combined in various 

 proportions." All this may be very true: yet, with all humility, 1 would beg 

 leave to remind those who rely implicitly on the chemist's word for the ana- 

 lysis of any living thing, that to resolve any thing, animate or inanimate, that 

 God has made, into its simple elements or component parts, is, to say the least 

 of it, a very deUcate task ; for the boiling of one thing into gas, or the burning 

 of another thing into a cinder, to tell their natures by applying tests to the 

 produce of what the element fire has made to fly off from the one on ap- 

 proaching it, and what it has left in passing over the other, can give but a 

 very vague idea of the real and original nature of the thing itself. However, 

 I shall have a host against me of great and learned men, with hard names 

 and tales of tests that they have tried, which prove their verdicts to be 

 very truth ; and that for the like of me, a mere gardener, and not even under- 

 standing gardening in all its branches, to begin to question the correctness of 

 what " has been found " in chemistry, is only one more example of the vulgar 

 errors that ignorant men are always stumbling into : yet, be this as it may, 

 I only pretend, in the humblest and clearest way I can, to give an opinion 

 on the workings of nature in the construction of the vegetable kingdom. 



Scarcely any thing can enter into the composition of a vegetable that is not 

 aeriform. The dung, lime, earth, and water, that grass grows out of, are far 

 from being in the grass in a gross state, for the tissue of which the grass is 

 built bears more resemblance to water than to any of the other media from 

 which it arose : but what is water ? — only a mixture ofgases of such a nature 

 that if a little more of one gas were in it, and a little less of another, it would 

 be so unlike water that it would explode like a cannon, and go flaming far off 

 into some new form. This is no idea of mine; therefore I am not to be ac- 

 countable for its accuracy : it is part of the memorandums I made from a 

 lecture by Professor Hemming (of the Marylebone Institution), at the Hall 

 of the Mechanics Institute, Brentford, where he decomposed water into hy- 

 drogen and oxygen, and proved these gases to be real by testing them with fire. 



Now, supposing this correct, or nearly so, and supposing Dr. Lindley's 

 theory correct of the gases of which vegetables are composed, we come 

 to the delicate point of how these gases are transformed into the living forms 

 in which they appear in every green thing: and, leaving out the unprofitable 

 search after the principle of life, and not attempting to settle the disputed 

 point as to whether tissue begets tissue, as some have said, I will examine 

 the media in which tissue is formed, and as these media are more or less 

 within our control, we are likely enough to be rewarded for our pains in 

 examining this matter; for I strongly suspect that this is the root of garden- 

 ing, and that the delving deep into the soil, and turning the lower layer up, 

 and the top layer down, confer benefits upon vegetation that have not been 

 dreamed of, for the following reasons. Suppose a new vine border made 

 of turfy loam, bone manure, &c. &c., well drained to carry off water, and 

 eke admit air, whether foul gas or clean pure air no matter; there must be 

 air, and that in great quantities, in the border and under the border. Now, 

 what becomes of this air so confined ? I mean that which lies in the cavities 

 in the soil. I shall suppose a cubic foot of the vine border to contain about 

 the bulk of a brick of good dung, such as a mixture of animal dung, bones, 

 grassy turf, &c., and about the bulk of two bricks of air, the rest being 



3d Ser.— 1843. VHI. d d 



