HORTICULTURAL REGISTER, 
January 1st, 1834. 
PART I. 
ORIGINAL CO M MUNI C A T IONS. 
HORTICULTURE.— Article I. 
ON CHEMISTRY, AS CONNECTED WITH THE DEVELOPEMENT 
AND GROWTH OF PLANTS. 
By the Author of the Domestic Gardeners' Manual. 
I might, perhaps, be acting more in conformity with custom and 
routine, were I to enter, at once into the investigation of Earths and 
Soils. These are the supporters of almost every individual subject 
of the vegetable kingdom, they form the matrix wherein the em¬ 
bryos of life are developed, and in which the materials of terrene 
nutriment are so laborated and distributed as to supply the advancing 
radicles with appropriate food. Again, they are substances upon 
which the art of the chemist has been legitimately exerted; and whose 
nature and components he has, by experiments and analysis, pretty 
accurately determined. 
But I greatly prefer postponing the enquiry into the constitution 
and offices o( the earths, until I have excited the reader’s attention 
to those mighty natural agents which are constantly at work, night 
and dav, and during every moment of the existence of the vegetable 
vital being. These agents are Water, Air, and Light; the last is 
perhaps the most directly influential, but the first, I conceive, has a 
prior claim to consideration, in as much as in all probability it stands 
before the others in the order of creation. I shall therefore make 
the subject of this paper, an enquiry into the nature and agency of 
Water.— How trifling a period of time has elapsed since water 
