REMARKS ON SOME VEGETABLE PHENOMENA. 
299 
to form such a society. This was most respectably attended; and from 
what then took place, there is every prospect that such an institution 
may be founded and set going as will ultimately tend to diffuse a love 
of flowers, and be a source of much rational amusement, not only to 
the members themselves, but to all those who may choose to witness 
the exhibitions. Much will depend on the code of regulations for the 
government of the society, being, in the first place, well and distinctly 
drawn up, published, and afterwards scrupulously adhered to by 
exhibitors. This may prevent heart-burnings which may occur even 
among the sweet scents and loveliest forms of the parterre. 
Remarks on some vegetable phenomena , as observable in the growth , 
fyc. —All observers of vegetable phenomena, as exhibited in the growth 
of plants, arrive at the conclusion that they not only derive or imbibe 
elemental food from the earth, but also a considerable portion from the 
air. The food of plants, as appears from chemical analysis, is composed 
of three or four simple bodies, viz. carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and a 
small portion of what is called azote. These are the ultimate elements 
of plants, and which are found in the earth, in the air, and in water. 
They are all aerial or gaseous fluids, and which if they were not, they 
could not be inhaled or taken up by plants, either through the delicate 
fibres of the roots, or by the pores of the cuticle of the leaves and bark. 
Water is, perhaps, the grossest fluid which can enter into plants, and 
it is probably the medium by which the other nutritive gases or chemical 
bodies above mentioned can find their way into the vascular system, 
and so become assimilated with the essential juices of the plant. 
That some combinations of those fluids are more nutritive than others 
has been many times clearly and repeatedly proved, some being absorbed 
by the roots, others by the leaves. Carbonic, or humic acid, as it is 
sometimes called, laid within range of the roots of a cabbage, very much 
enlarges its size; and if the pine-apple plant be grown in air strongly 
impregnated with ammoniacal gas (the rank scented steam arising from 
fresh stable-dung), it will not only be increased in bulk, but receive 
additional vigour from the absorption of the ammonia. 
The surface of the earth is the natural station of a great majority of 
plants, and some are purely aquatic: but there are many to which 
neither earth nor condensed water are necessary. There are several 
parasite plants, which, like the misletoe for instance, draw a great part 
of their sustenance from the plant on which they grow—taking from 
that what it would have required from the earth, were it a terrestrial 
plant. Others again, as the tribe of plants called epiphytes, inhabit 
the stems or trunks of lofty trees, but without sucking from them any 
of their juices. Such plants flourish only in thickly shaded, and con- 
