Science of Farmers. 513 
SCIENCE OF FARMERS. 
BY LEVI BARTLETT. 
The investigations and researches of chemists, have pretty 
clearly established many of the great principles of vegetable phy- 
siology. They have, as it were, with much exactness, ascertained 
the chemistry of vegetable food, or the sources and nature of the 
nutrition of plants, as also the relation subsisting between the seed 
that is deposited in the ground — the soil which furnishes the 
mineral or inorganic parts of plants, and which are found in their 
ash, after being burned — as well, also, as the nature and proper- 
ties of the combustible, gaseous, or organic portions of plants 
which are dissipated and fly off into the air when burned. 
The seed, as every one knows, when planted in the soil, and 
under favorable conditions, soon sends its shoot upwards, and its 
root downwards, both of which extend and enlarge; if the seed 
be that of an oak or a pine tree, this process of enlargement goes 
on for centuries, till this growth prepares the oak for a keel, or 
the pine for a mast of a " ship of the line." 
Agricultural chemistry has most fully, further established the 
fact, that, all that the soil has furnished towards the growth of 
the largest tree, is what remains in the form of ashes, after being 
burned in the fire; and how small a portion in bulk is the ash of 
a tree, compared with its wood before being burned ; an lOOlbs. 
of pine wood leaves less than half a pound of ash, when com- 
pletely burned. Well, say some, " if an lOOlbs. of pine wood has 
only drawn half a pound of its weight from the soil, from what 
source has the 99| lbs. that burns away been derived?" Well, 
kind reader, to attempt to answer this question, is the object of 
this article. In the ash of our cultivated plants there are found 
some ten or ele\;en elementary earthy substances, viz. : potash, 
soda, lime, magnesia, alumina, silex, iron, manganese, sulphur, 
phosphorus and chlorine, and these constituents of plants are 
termed inorganic, but as has been observed, they make up but 
a very small portion of the bulk of plants, and some of them are 
found in the ash in very minute quantity, but yet, they all seem 
to be essential to the healthy growth and full maturity of plants. 
These substances are invarialaly found in the ash of plants, not 
merely because they were in the soil in a soluble -state in which 
the plants grew, but in accordance with those fixed physiological 
laws that govern the vcG;etable world, and so stringent are those 
laws, that a soil deficient in a very few of these inorganic bodies, 
cannot yield seed capable of reproducing its kind, they are abso- 
lutely essential to the full and perfect developement of the seed 
bearing plants. 
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