320 
Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. 
Afternoon Session . 
President Stilson in the chair. 
RELATION OF THE SOIL TO WATER. 
BY PROF. JOHN MURRISH, MAZGMANIE. 
Water as existing in nature, is not a compound of oxygen and 
hydrogen merely, but a liquid containing well defined physical pro¬ 
perties, such as the power to dissolve solid substances, and to carry 
such dissolved material in solution; the power also to absorb gaseous 
matter in most of its forms, especially such as carbonic acid, am¬ 
monia, and such like material as is essential to plant-formation. 
These properties of water constitute it one of the most powerful 
and widely-spread physical forces, and in its presence, and under its 
influence, is carried on the most important formations and trans¬ 
formations of matter in every department of nature. 
In the mineral kingdom, water is a universal solvent, traversing 
not only the fissures and cracks in the earths crust, hut the finest 
pores of the solid rock, gathering up waste matter, dissolving and 
removing in solution worn out compounds, changing the chemical 
constitution and relation of others, becoming at the same time the 
medium through which matter is removed from place to place to 
meet the demands of chemical forces. 
Nor is water a less powerful or a less efficient agent in the veget¬ 
able kingdom. Rising in the form of vapor from seas, lakes, and 
rivers, it traverses the lengths and breadths of the atmosphere above 
us, seizing the waste matter, whether gaseous or solid, organic or in¬ 
organic, that is continually being poured into it from the earth’s 
surface; and returning again in the shape of rain, snow, and dew, 
yields up this fugitive matter to the earth, which, with the less vola¬ 
tile residuum of decomposing vegetation on the surface, is conveyed 
either in solution or mechanical suspension to the soil, to be worked 
up into vegetable forms. 
It is in the soil, however, where the properties of water are the 
most signally marked in their adaptation to the vegetable kingdom. 
Plants cannot live upon solid matter. No matter what may be 
the chemical constitution of the soil, it is not available as plant- 
food, or as plant-forming material, until it is reduced to a soluble 
