' EMPROVEMENT OF SEEDS. AND SHBD RAINS, 4 
. their preservation.and, their enlargement. Plants and animals are nourished by pro- 
cesses that may be considered in three dificrent stages. In animals we speak of the 
processes as digestion, absorption, assimilation. Digestion is the process of making 
soluble, absorption is the process of. taking. into the juices or fluids of the body, as- 
- similation is the process of change into the structure of the body or its fluids. Plants 
are nourished in a similar way. Plants take nothing in through their rootlets that has 
not been previously digested, that is, made soluble. Nothing enters a plant except in 
either a soluble condition through the roots or in a gaseous state by the leaves. So 
there is digestion of all crude plant food before it goes into the roots of the plants; 
after that it enters into the juices of the plants and is absorbed, then it is assimilated 
and, moved about afterwards to different parts of the plant. As you know, plants take 
in food in a liquid form through their roots and in a gaseous form through their leaves. 
All the starch, the carbohydrates that form the bulk of their weight, comes in through 
the leaves. It is not taken out of the soil to any extent at all, Plants largely feed in 
and on the atmosphere; but they take things out of the soil in a partly digested state. 
It will be sufficient to make a few observations on some of the sources of food sub- 
stances before I speak of the large bearing and sweep of this matter of organizing seed 
-growers’ associations, , 
THE RESULTS FROM BACTERIA IN SOIL. 
The source of food materials: soils are composed of broken down rocks, some are 
clay, some sand, and some gravel, or mixtures of all three mixed with broken down 
organisms, such as leaves, stems, roots, bones and bits of leather. These two make the 
soil—broken down inorganic matter and broken down organic matter. As I very 
well know, many members of the Committee are not professisonal men and words, and 
the ideas they represent, are sometimes unfamiliar when used in a new connection. 
Organic matter is only matter that has once formed part of an organism that lived; 
it may have been a tiny so-called micro-organism, or it may have been a very large 
tree. Soil is made up of broken down matter; inorganic matter that has never lived 
in an organism; and organic matter, the remains of what,has once lived. With these 
materials must be some water in order that they may be made soluble and in a fit state 
for the rootlets to take them in; and with these three—inorganic, organic and water— 
must be living organisms to carry on the work of preparing the organic and inorganie 
matter and water into food materials suitable for the sustenance and nutrition of 
plants. These organisms are not well understood by farmers. It is only of late years 
that anybody has understood their manifold functions and use; but crops never grow 
except as preceded 'by the labours of these organisms, in preparing, in practically digest- 
ing, food substances for them. We need to know more of these things. This is one of 
the new things that is dawning on agriculture and is bringing not merely pleasure and 
interest into the work, but an increased power of producing good crops and maintain- 
ing the fertility of the soil. If you take a portion of soil and heat it so as to destroy 
the life of these little organisms it will afterwards carry only a very few crops. The 
plant food that has been liberated by the organisms is there in only very small quanti- 
ties; and as soon as that is exhausted the land is absolutely barren, until myriads of 
lowly forms of life come into it again to make the raw material which it contains fit 
for the use of the crops. That has been proven many times. It is not enough to have 
substances—ingredients of plant food—in the soil to nourish the plants, but to have 
them in a suitable condition, partly prepared for the plants to use. Now that plant food is 
being continually prepared in the soil by the action of bacteria or soil germs. There 
are series of changes going on, partly chemical and partly physical, as a result of 
their life and of their activity. They digest the crude plant food. They are the cooks 
of nature that prepare the food for the higher forms of liying things, primarily, because 
the higher life lives on the things that they prepare. : How can you make the con- 
ditions favourable for their multiplication and beneficial activity? Let me give you 
one instance—take an orchard that has been in sod for a great many years, and if you 
