214 
MANURES THE FOOD OF PLANTS. — NO. 3. 
of September. I prefer leaving a little wood 
attached to the buds, rather than take it all off 
as is usually the case. It appears to keep the 
bud alive longer, giving it a better chance to 
unite to the stock. 
If the trees are to be transplanted, they ought 
not to stand longer than one season from the 
bud. As a general thing, the younger they are 
transplanted, the better. The soil in which 
Lhey are to grow, does not require to be very 
rich. Such land as we have overrun with red 
cedar and bayberry bushes will produce good 
peaches by breaking it up, and sowing, broad- 
cast upon it, from 8 to 10 bushels of bone dust 
to the acre. 
My plan of killing the peach borer is, to 
scrape away the dirt from around the roots of 
the trees in the fall, say about the middle of 
September, when, if there are any of these in- 
sects, they may easily be detected and killed, 
before they get far into the bark. By leaving 
the roots bare a few days, and going over them 
again, I am sure to kill them all. I then take a 
shovelful of wood ashes and put around each 
tree, and haul back the earth to its place. 
My remedy for the " yellows," which I con- 
sider a contagious disease, is, to destroy the tree, 
root and branch, as soon as the least symptom 
appears. 
Hawley B. Rogers. 
Huntington, L. I., May, 1850. 
MANURES— THE FOOD OF PLANTS.— No. 3. 
In the two numbers preceding, I gave the 
names of the inorganic constituents of plants, 
and endeavored to point out various sources 
from which the enterprising and calculating 
farmer could frequently and economically ob- 
tain them, for the purpose of restoring to his 
soil an equivalent for those removed from it by 
the crops harvested. I proposed, also, to say 
something respecting the organic portions of 
plants, or those gaseous substances which make 
up the great visible bulk of all the vegetable 
productions of the earth, and which perform 
such important purposes in their growth, and in 
the maturing of their fruits and seeds. 
Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen make 
up the great bulk of all vegetable and animal 
productions; and they constitute that portion of 
a plant or animal, which is dissipated in the 
process of burning; the result of which is 
nearly the same, whether the combustion is at 
once effected in the fierce fire of a steam engine, 
or the more gradual decay, by natural decom- 
position, or the rotting process, that, sooner or 
later, takes place in dead organic matter. In 
either case, they are ultimately resolved into 
these four organic bodies, and are thus prepared 
in the economy of nature, to be again worked up 
into new forms of vegetable and animal life. 
Every cord of wood that is burned restores to 
the atmosphere just sufficient carbon for the 
growth of another cord; so of the oxygen, &c. 
And of all the organic matter that once formed 
the bodies of the soldiers of Xerxes' vast army, 
not one particle has been lost, or annihilated; 
and, doubtless, some of the identical molecular 
particles of organic matter, that composed part 
of the bodies of those soldiers, have been trans- 
mitted from vegetable to animal matter, and 
vice versa, hundreds of times since the battle of 
Thermopylae. 
Carbon, in its solid and nearly pure form, we 
have in charcoal, and in a dissolved state with 
oxygen, as carbonic acid gas. Oxygen, hydro- 
gen, and nitrogen are, in their elementary state, 
simple gases, or invisible air. We have oxy- 
gen and hydrogen in a liquid form in the water 
we drink, and oxygen and nitrogen in a gaseous 
form in the air we breathe. These three simple 
gases in the laboratory of the skillful chemist, 
can be handled, weighed, and measured, and 
can be combined in different proportions, so as 
to form a great variety of gaseous, liquid and 
solid chemical substances, and some of them, 
too, of a most destructive and virulent nature. 
Yet, with all his skill, the chemist cannot manu- 
facture from these three gases and carbon 
alone, nor by the addition of any, nor of all the 
inorganic matters of plants, any compound or 
mixture, that will answer the purposes of nu- 
trition, nor as food that will sustain animal life. 
" And as far as our knowledge at present extends, 
no animal is endowed with powers of assimila- 
tion sufficiently potent to convert into nutriment 
carbon, nitrogen, and the other ultimate ele- 
ments of animal substances. These elementary 
materials require the previous and more efficient 
action of vegetable chemistry. And such is the 
vital energy of that chemistry — so thoroughly 
does it elaborate and combine those elements, 
that little beyond solution and separation is 
required of the digestive functions of the higher 
orders of creation." 
It therefore follows, that animals cannot exist 
except through the intervention and instru- 
mentality of plants; and it follows, too, that 
vegetable preceded animal life. Moses so tells 
us in his History of the Creation. Geologists so 
teach; and researches in animal physiology 
confirm the truth of Moses and the geologist. 
The soil might exist without the plants, tho 
plants might live and die, though there were 
no animals to feed upon them, but the ani- 
mal is, as it were, the creature and the con- 
sequence of both. Long before Virgil's time, it 
was known that animal manures applied to the 
land increased the amount of produce, and kept 
up the fertility of the soil in proportion to the 
amount of manure applied ; but it has been left 
to the researches of modern chemists to explain to 
us the how and the wherefore of the favorable ac- 
tion of manures upon the growing crops ; as well, 
also, as the part that some of these elementary 
substances play in the formation of the different 
parts and products of plants. The carbon of 
plants, (that part which can be made into char- 
coal,) which forms from 40 to 50 per cent, of their 
dry weight, is supposed to be principally derived 
from the carbonic acid of the atmosphere, the 
absorption and decomposition of which is effect- 
ed by the direct agency of the leaves of plants, 
in daylight. In the leaf, the carbon is separated 
from the oxygen 3 which is restored to the air s 
