Food for Plants. 301 
What then? Only this: that Infinite Wisdom protects their lives 
and health by preventing your crops from growing — organizing 
grass roots, tubers, seeds or fruit of any kind — one pound beyond 
the supply of each constituent element required to make the whole 
body of a Man. Think of this truth, and remember God has en- 
dowed us with high intellectual faculties, for the great purpose 
that we may study and understand " how wonderfully and fear- 
fully we are made!" 
In using vegetable vitality with a view to organize food for 
man, you have much to learn. All that the writer can do is to give 
a few hints. Salt this remark down in one corner of your memory: 
Vegetable vitality alone is endowed with the power to combine 
those constituent elements of plants and animals, called lime, pot- 
ash, soda, silicia, magnesia, iron, chlorine, sulphur, phosphorus, 
carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, into living compounds. 
A man, a bird, a fish, an insect, a worm — all animals — can alike 
subsist on a slice of good wheat bread; that is, they can organize 
their bones, feathers, scales, flesh, &c., out of the elements already 
organized by the vitality in the germs of the wheat plant. Mark 
well the grand natural distinction between animal and vegetable 
vitality. Decompose your slice of bread by burning it, or any 
other means, into its original mineral elements, [air and water are 
minerals as much as iroii in the language of science); and collect 
all the constituents of the bread in a clean glass vessel. Now, 
neither man, fish, bird nor insect can form a particle of fliesh out 
of the matter which made the bread; but a young plant, under 
favorable circumstances of light, warmth, &c., can reorganize all 
the constituents of the bread into nutritious food for animals. 
Vegetable life has infinitely greater force than that of animals; 
but it cannot transmute one element into another — iron into gold, 
for instance — nor create anew one particle of any element when 
perchance it shall be lacking and needed this season to organize 
for you a large yield of sound potatoes. Vegetable life is older 
than animal life. 
That portion of the food of cultivated plants which is most de- 
ficient in ordinary soils, viz: bone-earth or phosphate of lime, sul- 
phate of lime or gypsum, chloride of sodium or common salt, salts 
of potash and magnesia, we find from a great number of analyses, 
more abundant in the sub than in the surface soil. This is a fact 
of much importance as a purely practical question of tillage. It 
indicates the utility of breaking up, and making fine the tinder- 
crust, so that all hungry roots may readily penetrate far into the 
bosom of their mother earth. The subsoil need not be brought to 
the surface, unless you prefer so to do. Deep tilth and thorough 
drainage are still sadly neglected in all parts of the United States. 
As an ounce of copperas, alum, or other salt will spoil an other- 
