300 Food for Plants. 
FOOD OF PLANTS. 
BY DR. LEE. 
All thinking, reasoning men have become satisfied that to form 
one, two, or three tons of any crop on an acre of land in a season, 
the vegetable vitality which changes earth, air and \\'ater into 
such crop can operate successfully no further than the supply of 
matter precisely adapted to the wants of each plant extends. The 
theory is that no amount of hard work can possibly make corn, 
potatoes, wheat, or apples, or any other living thing, out of no- 
thing. Nor can it foim them by any possibility out of other 
ingredients than the things which God has appointed for that pur- 
pose. Hence, if your soil has 99 parts in 100 within reach of a 
crop of potatoes or corn, of all that is required to make 80 bushels 
of the latter and 400 of the former, on an acre, these 99 parts go 
for nothing, just so far as the other one part is lacking. To illus- 
trate: 100 pounds of gypsum have often added 2,000 pounds of 
clover hay, to an acre; and could you fairly estimate the increase 
of clover roots, and all below where the scythe clips, the net gain 
would be 3,000 pounds. 
Your reason, kind reader, informs you that 100 pounds of sul- 
phur, oxygen, and the metal called calcium, (which are the con- 
stituents of gypsum,) never created 29,000 pounds of clover out 
of nothing. The 2,900 pounds of matter, which with the addi- 
tion of the sulphur and perhaps lime in the gypsum, formed 3,000 
lbs. of the plants named, existed within reach of the clover as well 
before as after the lacking elements were applied. But, as no 
other element in the world can fill the place which God has as- 
signed to sulphur in organizing the living bodies of vegetables 
and animals, wherever and whenever this substance is lacking, 
such organization cannot proceed. Any bird which can organize 
a perfect egg without a particle of sulphur to enter into the com- 
position of its yolk, can create and lay a little world, with all its 
inhabitants! In 100 lbs. of feathers, wool and hair there is 5 lbs. 
of sulphur. If clover contained not an atom of this substance, 
how could the sheep, the cow, the horse, or the pig, subsist on 
food which lacked an indispensable constituent of its brain and 
nerves, its flesh and hair, and of the milk designed by the Creator 
to build up every tissue of its young offspring? 
You know, for Heaven has made you a reasoning, intelligent 
human being, that neither children nor brutes can know whether 
the plants on which they live — the seeds of maize, beans and 
wheat — the fruits of the apple, pear, peach, and the vine — eon- 
tain the elements necessary to form their bones and their muscles. 
