# History of botany (1530–1860)/Book 3/Chapter 2

CHAPTER II.
History of the Theory of the Nutrition of Plants. 1583-1860.
That plants take up certain substances from their environ- ment for the purpose of building up their own structures could not be a matter of doubt even in the earliest times; it was also obvious, that movements of the nutrient material must be connected with this proceeding. But it was not so easy to say, what was the nature of this food of plants, in what manner it finds its way into and is distributed in them, and what are the forces employed ; it was even for a long time undecided, whether the food taken up from without surfers any change inside the plant, before it is applied to purposes of growth. Such were the questions which had engaged the attention of Aristotle, and which formed the chief subject of Cesalpino's physiological meditations.
But the questions respecting the nutrition of plants acquired a much more definite shape in the latter half of the 17th century, when the various phenomena of vegetation began to be more closely observed, and some attempt was made to understand their relations to the outer world. Malpighi, the founder of phytotomy, was the first who undertook to explain the share which belongs to the different organs of the plant in the whole work of nutrition; guided by analogy, he perceived that the green leaves are the organs which prepare the food, and that the material so prepared by them passes into all parts of the plant, there to be stored up or employed for purpose ​ of growth. But this gave no insight into the nature of the substances from which plants prepare their food. On this point Mariotte endeavoured to give such information as could be obtained from the chemistry of his day; and he has the merit of having shown, in opposition to the old Aristotelian notion, that plants convert the food-material which they derive from the ground into new chemical combinations, while the earth and the water supply the same elements of nutrition to the most different kinds of plants. It could not escape the notice of physiologists even of that time, that the water which plants take up from the ground introduces into them but very small quantities of matter in solution. Van Helmont in the first half of the 17th century had shown this by an experiment, the results of which, however, led him to think that plants were able to produce both the combustible and incombustible parts of their substance from water. Hales at the beginning of the 18th century formed a different opinion, being led by the evolution of the gases in the dry distillation of plants to conclude, that a considerable part of their substance was absorbed in a gaseous form from the atmosphere.
The views propounded by Malpighi, Mariotte, and Hales contained the most important elements of a theory of the nutrition of plants; fully understood they would have taught that one part of the food of plants comes from the earth and the water, and another part from the air; that the leaves change the materials thus obtained in such a manner as to produce from them the substance of plants and to apply this to the purposes of growth; but the ideas were not combined in this way, for during some years after their time botanists were chiefly engaged in observations on the movement of the sap in plants, and they arrived even on this point at very obscure and even contradictory results, because they overlooked the function of the leaves which had already been recognised by Malpighi. All insight not only into the chemical processes in the nutrition of plants, but also into the mechanical laws of ​ the movement of the sap, and generally into the whole internal economy of plants, depends on a knowledge of the fact, that it is only the cells which contain chlorophyll, and therefore in the higher plants the leaves chiefly as consisting largely of such cells, which have the power of converting the gaseous food supplied by the atmosphere into the substance of the plant with the aid of the materials taken up from the soil. This fact is of fundamental importance to the whole theory of the nutrition of plants; it is only by a knowledge of it that we can explain the movement of material connected with nutrition and growth, the dependence of vegetation on light, and to a great extent also the function of the roots.
But this principle could not be discovered till the new chemical system founded by Lavoisier took the place of the old phlogistic chemistry, and it is remarkable that the discoveries, which laid the foundation of modern chemistry in the period between 1760 and 1780, contributed essentially to the establishment at the same time of the modern doctrine of the nutrition of plants. Ingen-Houss, in reliance on Lavoisier's antiphlogistic views on the composition of air, water, and the mineral acids, succeeded in proving that all parts of plants are continually absorbing oxygen and forming carbon dioxide, but that the green organs at the same time under the influence of light absorb carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen ; and as early as 1796 he considered it probable that plants obtain the whole mass of their carbon from the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere. Soon after (1804) de Saussure proved, that plants, while they decompose carbon dioxide, increase in weight by a greater amount than that of the carbon which they retain, and that this is to be explained by the fact that they at the same time fix the elements of water. He likewise showed that the small quantities of saline compounds, which plants take up from the soil, are a necessary part of their food, and that it was at least probable, that the nitrogen of the atmosphere does not contribute to the formation of nitrogenous substances in plants. Setiebier ​ had before insisted on the fact, that the decomposition of carbon dioxide under the influence of light only takes place in green organs.
Thus the most important points in the nutrition of plants were discovered by Ingen-Houss, Senebier and de Saussure. But, as often happens in the case of discoveries of such magnitude, their ideas were for a long time exposed to great misunderstanding. They were better appreciated in France than in any other country; Dutrochet and De Candolle were able to see the importance of the interchange of gases in the green organs to the general nutrition and respiration; but others, and especially German botanists, were not content with these simple chemical processes as the foundation of the whole system of nutrition and consequently of the whole life of the plant ; the theory of the vital force, which was elaborated in connection with the nature-philosophy during the first years of the 19th century, and was generally accepted by philosophers and physiologists, chemists and physicists, preferred to supply the plant with a mysterious substance for its food, which had its source in the life itself and which it called humus. The most obvious considerations, which must at once have shown that this humus-theory was absurd, were entirely overlooked; and thus in the face of de Saussure's results the food of plants was once more referred entirely to the soil and the roots, as it was in the earliest times; one of the consequences of this humus-theory in combination with the vital force was that the ash-constituents of plants were supposed to be merely accidental admixtures or stimulants, or to be directly produced in the plant by the vital force.
In the period between 1820 and 1840 the reaction set in from different quarters against the theory of vital force; chemists succeeded in producing by artificial means certain organic compounds, which had hitherto been regarded as products of that force; Dutrochet discovered in endosmose a process, which served to refer various vital phenomena in ​ plants to physico-mechanical principles; de Saussure and others showed that the heat of plants is a product of respiration, and by 1840 the earlier theory of a vital force might be looked upon as antiquated and obsolete. It remained to restore to their rights the observations of Ingen-Houss and de Saussure, which under the influence of that theory and of the notions respecting the humus had been so utterly misconstrued. Liebig set aside the humus-theory in 1840, and referred the carbon of plants entirely to the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere, and their nitrogenous contents to ammonia and its derivatives; he claimed the components of the ash as essential factors in the nutrition, and taking his stand on the general laws of chemistry endeavoured to obtain chiefly by the method of deduction an insight into the chemical processes of assimilation and metabolism. The whole theoretical value of the facts discovered by Ingen-Houss, Senebier and de Saussure was first made apparent by the connection which Liebig succeeded in establishing between the phenomena of nutrition. The doctrine of nutrition burst suddenly into new life; firm ground was gained, and the botanist, no longer distracted by the difficulties raised by the vital force but resting on physical and chemical principles, might now resume the task of investigation. Oxygen-respiration denied by Liebig was first of all re-established by von Mohl and others. Liebig's views on the source of nitrogen in plants and on the importance of the ash-constituents rested chiefly on general considerations and observations and on calculation, and had now to be tested by systematic investigation and especially by experiments on vegetation in individual plants. And here the place of honour must be assigned to Boussingault, who pursued the path of pure induction as contrasted with Liebig's deductive mode of proceeding, gradually improved the methods for experimenting on vegetation, and soon succeeded in so producing plants in a purely mineral soil free from all humus, that he finally settled the question of the derivation of the carbon from the atmosphere ​ and of the source of the nitrogen also. He showed from the plants thus artificially nourished, and with due consideration of the many sources of error which beset the question, that the uncombined nitrogen of the atmosphere does not contribute to the nutrition of plants, but that a normal increase in the nitrogenous substances in a plant takes place when the roots take up nitrates as well as the necessary constituents of the ash. With the exception of some doubts which still remained respecting the necessity of certain constituents of the ash, such as sodium, chlorine and silicic acid, the source of the materials which take a part in the chemistry of the nutrition of plants was known before 1860; but the knowledge obtained with regard to processes in the interior of the plant, the origination of organic substances in the processes of assimilation, and the further changes which they undergo was still fragmentary and uncertain, and led to no general and conclusive results.
i. Cesalpino.
Aristotle had sought to determine the nature of the materials which plants take up as food, and had laid down the proposition, that the food of all organisms is not simple but composed of various substances. This view was correct, but he united with it the erroneous notion, that the food of plants is elaborated beforehand in the earth, as in a stomach, and is made applicable to purposes of growth, so as to exclude the necessity of any separation of excrements in the plant; this error was refuted by Jung, as we shall see, but nevertheless it continued to live as late as into the 18th century, and ultimately quite spoilt Du Hamel’s theory of nutrition.
Cesalpino, whom we have learnt to regard as a faithful and gifted disciple of Aristotle, directed his speculations to the mechanical rather than to the chemical side of the question, and chiefly tried to explain the movement of the nutrient sap in plants. He had a larger stock of material drawn from ​ experience at his disposition than his master, and it is instructive therefore to make a nearer acquaintance with his views, because they show how far the old philosophy was in a condition to turn better empirical knowledge than Aristotle possessed to a satisfactory use ; they will also show that Cesalpino's first essays led him to views which can no longer be said to be strictly Aristotelian.
In the second chapter of the first book of the work from which we have already quoted, 'De plantis libri XVI,' 1583, he raises the question, in what way the food of plants is taken in and their nutrition accomplished. In animals we see the food conveyed from the veins to the heart, which is the laboratory of the warmth of the body, and after it has been finally perfected there, spread abroad through the arteries into all parts of the body; and this is effected by the operation of the force (spiritus) which is generated in the heart from the food. In plants on the contrary we see no veins, or other channels, nor do we feel any warmth in them, so that it is difficult to under- stand how trees grow to so great a size, since they seem to have much less natural heat than animals. Cesalpino explains this enigma by saying, that animals require much food for maintaining the activity of the senses and the movements of their organs. The larger quantity of animal food also requires larger receptacles, namely the veins. Plants on the other hand need less food, because this is only used for purposes of nutrition, or to a very small extent for the production of internal heat as well, and therefore they grow more vigorously and bear more fruit than animals. At the same time plants are not without internal heat, though it cannot be perceived by the touch because all objects seem cold to us, which are less warm than our organ of feeling. That plants moreover have veins, though only narrow ones in accordance with the small mass of their food, is shown by those which yield a milky juice, such as Euphorbia and Ficus, which when cut bleed like the flesh of animals; Cesalpino adds 'and this is ​ very frequent also in the vine,' which shows that he made no distinction between milky juice and the exuding water of the weeping vine-stock. These narrow veins cannot be seen on account of their fineness; but in every stem and in every root things may be discerned which like nerves in animals can be split longitudinally and are called the nerves of the plant, or also certain thicker things, such as those which branch in most leaves and are there called veins. These should be considered as food-passages and as answering to the veins in animals; but plants have no main vein like the vena cava in animals, but many fine veins pass from the root to the heart of the plant (cor, root-neck, see above, Book I. chap. 2), and ascend from it into the stem; for it was not necessary that the food should be collected in a common receptacle in plants, as it is in the heart in animals, where this is necessary for the production of the spiritus, but it was sufficient that the fluid in plants should be changed by contact with the medulla cordis (in the root-neck), as it is changed in animals in the marrow of the brain or in the liver ; and in these organs the veins are very narrow, as they are in plants.
Since plants have no sense-perception, they cannot seek their food like animals, but they draw up the moisture from the ground into themselves in a way of their own ; but it is not easy to see how this takes place. Cesalpino, in trying to explain this, gives us a glimpse into the physics of the day, and we observe also to our surprise an attempt made to explain phenomena in living creatures by physical laws, a step beyond the limits of Aristotelian modes of thought and in the right direction. It is not the ratio similitudinis, which draws iron to the magnet, that can cause the attraction of the juice by the roots, for then the smaller would be drawn to the larger ; and if the attraction of the fluid of the earth by the roots were the same thing as the attraction of the iron by the magnet, the moisture of the earth would draw out the juice from the plant, which is just what does not happen. Nor can ​ it be the ratio vacui; for since not moisture only but air also is contained in the earth, the plant would be filled not with juice but with air. But Cesalpino hits upon a third kind of cause by which juices may be drawn into the plant. Do not many dry things, he says, in accordance with their nature attract moisture, as linen, sponge and powder, while others repel it, as the feathers of many birds and the herb Adiantum, which are not wetted even when dipped in water; but the former absorb much water, because they have more in common with it than with air; of this kind Cesalpino thinks those parts of plants must be, which the nourishing soul employs to take in food. Therefore these organs are not traversed by a continuous canal such as the veins in animals, but formed like the nerves of a fibrous substance; and thus the power of suction (bibula natura) conveys the moisture continually to the place, where the principle of internal heat is placed, just as may be seen in the flame of a lantern, to which the wick continually conducts the oil. The absorption of the moisture is also increased by the outer warmth, for which reason plants grow more vigorously in spring and summer.
That Cesalpino had no suspicion of the use of the leaves in the nutrition of plants appears incontestably from his repeating the Aristotelian idea, that the leaves are only for the protection of young shoots and fruits from air and sun-light; this idea is no result of speculation, but came simply from observing a vineyard in a hot country.
2. First inductive experiments and opening of new points of view in the History of the Theory of the Nutrition of Plants.
All that Aristotle and his school, Cesalpino not excepted, are able to tell us about the phenomena of vegetable life, was the result of the most every-day observations, none of which were critically and exactly tested to ascertain their actual correctness, ​ while the larger part of their physiological axioms were not derived from observations on plants at all, but from philosophical principles, and especially from analogies taken from the animal world.
The first step towards a scientific treatment of the doctrine of nutrition was an enlargement and critical examination of the materials to be gained from experience; nor were any difficult observations or experiments needed to discover contradictions between the truths of nature and the old philosophy; all that was necessary was to look into things more closely and to judge of them with less prejudice.
​ According to Aristotle's view the plant itself was quite passive in the work of nutrition; since food was offered to it which had been already prepared for it in the earth, growth was to some extent merely a process of crystallisation unaccompanied by chemical change. In pointing to the formation of excreta Jung on the contrary ascribed a chemical activity to the plant, and by supposing that the organisation of the root was such as to prevent the entrance of certain matters and to favour that of others, he made the plant co-operate in its own nourishment, though he did not assume that it needed a thinking soul for this purpose.
Johann Baptist van Helmont, physician and chemist, and a contemporary of Jung, took up a position still more decidedly opposed to Aristotelian doctrines. He rejected the four elements of that philosophy, and regarding water as a chief constituent of all things he considered that the whole substance of plants, the mineral parts (the ash) as well as the combustible, was formed from water. Thus while Aristotle made the component parts of plants be introduced into them by water in a state ready for use, Van Helmont, on the contrary, ascribed to the plant the power of producing all kinds of material from water. It would scarcely have been necessary to mention this resistance to old dogmas, originating as it did in the notions of the alchemists, if Van Helmont had not made an attempt to establish his views by experiment; this was the first experiment in vegetation undertaken for a scientific purpose of which we have any information, and it was repeatedly quoted by many later physiologists, and employed in support of their theories. He placed in a pot a certain quantity of earth, which when highly dried weighed two hundred pounds; a willow-branch ​ weighing five pounds was set in this pot, which was protected by a cover from dust, and daily watered with rain-water. In five years' time the willow had grown to be large and strong, and had increased in weight by a hundred and sixty-four pounds, though the earth in the pot, when once more dried, only showed a loss of two ounces. Van Helmont concluded from this experiment that the considerable increase of weight in the plant had been gained entirely at the cost of the water, and consequently that all the materials in the plant, though distinct from water, nevertheless come from it.
These objections to Aristotelian teaching on the part of Jung and Van Helmont remained isolated and unproductive. But an incentive to new investigations in vegetable physiology was supplied from a different quarter, and its influence lasted till far into the 18th century. This was the suggestion, that not only does a nutrient sap taken up by the roots ascend to the leaves and fruits of plants, but that there is also a movement of the same sap in the opposite direction in the rind. But this idea assumed from the first two different forms. Some botanists, evidently resting on the analogy of the circulation of the blood in animals, supposed that there was also an actual circulation of the sap in plants ; others on the contrary were content with supposing that while the watery sap absorbed by the roots rises in the wood, an elaborated sap capable of ministering to growth moves in the rind, the laticiferous vessels, and the resin-ducts. The two views were at a later time repeatedly confounded together, and those who refuted the first believed that they had refuted the other also. It appears that a physician from Breslau, Johann Daniel Major, Pro​ fessor in Kiel, first gave expression to the opinion, that there is a circulation of the nourishing substance in plants as in animals; and from this time to the end of the 18th century the circulation of the juices of plants was a favourite subject of discussion, but more often chosen by the impugners of the doctrine than by its defenders.
The better form of the idea, namely, that there is a return-movement of material towards the root, combined with the view, that the leaves are the organs which produce the substances required for growth from the crude material supplied to them, was expressed by Malpighi as early as 1771 in the shape of a well-considered theory. In his 'Anatomes plantarum idea ' of that year he devotes the last pages to a short account of the theory of nutrition, as he understood it. He regarded the fibrous constituents of the wood as the organs for conducting the sap taken up by the roots, and the vessels as air-passages, which he named tracheae on account of their resemblance to the tracheae of insects. He was in doubt whether the air came from the earth through the roots, or from the atmosphere through the leaves, for he had never succeeded in finding openings for the entrance of air in the roots or the leaves ; but he thought it more probable that the air is absorbed by the roots, because they are well supplied with tracheae, and air has besides a tendency to ascend. Beside these fluid-conducting fibres and air-conducting tracheae in the wood he called attention to the existence of special vessels, which conduct peculiar juices in many plants, as the laticiferous vessels, gum-passages, and turpentine-canals.
Respecting the movement of the juices, he notices that the direction may be reversed, because shoots planted upside down send out roots into the earth from what is organically their upper end, and grow into trees; and though they do not grow vigorously, yet the experiment proves that the movement of the sap in them is in the reverse direction. ​ After these preliminary remarks he proceeds to prove, that it is in the leaves that the crude juices of nutrition undergo the change which fits them for the maintenance of growth. The way in which Malpighi arrives at this view is as simple as it is original. He considers the cotyledons of young plants to be genuine leaves (in leguminibus seminalis caro, quae folium est conglobatum), as is shown in the gourd, where the cotyledons grow into large green leaves. Liquid is conveyed to them through the radicle, and a portion of the substances which they contain passes from them into the plumule to make it grow, which it will not do if the cotyledons are removed; hence he concludes that all other leaves also are intended to elaborate (excoquere) the nutritive juice contained in their cells, which the woody fibres have conveyed to them. The liquids mingled together in their long passage through the network of fibres are changed in the leaves by the power of the sun's rays, and blended with the sap before contained in their cells, and thus a new combination of the constituent parts is effected, trans- piration proceeding at the same time ; he compares the whole process with that which goes on in the blood of animals.
We see that Malpighi's view of the function of the leaves in nutrition approaches very closely to the truth, as closely indeed as was at all possible in the existing condition of chemical knowledge. He was induced by the results of anatomical investigation to carry this view farther and indeed correctly; he supposed that the parenchymatous tissue of the rind acts in the same way as the leaves ; but he went a step too far in assigning the function of the leaves to the colourless parenchyma also, which only serves for the storing up of assimilated matter. He says we must ascribe a character similar to that of the leaf-cells to the corresponding cells in the rind and to those also which lie transversely in the wood (the medullary and cortical rays), and that it is not unreasonable to conclude that the food of the plant is elaborated and stored up in these cells. As he makes no sharp distinction between elaboration and ​ mere storing up, he ascribes the function of the leaves to the parenchyma of fleshy fruits also and to the scales of bulbs; he concludes from the exudations from stumps of trees and from the cut surfaces of other parts of plants, that they are filled with reserve-matter (asservato humore turgent).
Thus the essential points in Malpighi's theory of nutrition in the year 1671 were, that the vessels of the wood are primarily air-conducting organs, that the leaves elaborate the crude sap for purposes of growth, that the sap so elaborated is stored up in different parts of the plant, and that the fibrous elements of the wood convey upwards to the leaves the crude materials of nutrition which are absorbed by the roots. No mention is made of a circulation of juices, comparable to the circulation of the blood, though this idea was in later times often imputed to him; and we find by his later remarks, that while he was in no doubt as to the elementary organs which convey the ascending sap, he confined himself to conjecture with respect to the way by which the sap elaborated in the cell-tissue of the leaves, rind and parenchyma generally is carried on its further course. But he was in no doubt about the direction of that course ; he believed that this sap forces itself downwards through the stem into the roots, and upwards in the branches above the leaves and so into the fruit. Thus Malpighi had formed a more correct idea of the movement of assimilated matter than the majority of his successors who introduced the very unsuitable expression, 'descending sap.' He further thought it probable that the elaborated sap passes through the bast-bundles, but without a continuous flux and reflux (absque perenni et considerabili fluxu et refluxu) ; that it rests to some extent in the laticiferous vessels, but that it is also driven sometimes, when occasion requires, by transpiration and external causes into the higher ​ parts of the plant, where it is the means of maintaining growth and nutrition. These later remarks also are better than much that was said about the movement of the sap in the 18th and even in the 19th century, and at all events they prove that to speak of Malpighi as a defender of the circulation of the sap in Major's sense, as was often -done in later times, was an entire misunderstanding of his views.
Malpighi published his theory in a brief and connected form in 1671; it appeared again further worked out in detail in the fuller edition of the Phytotomy in 1674 ; he attributed a special value to his discovery, that plants require air to breathe as much as animals, and that the vessels of the wood answer in function to the tracheae in insects and to the lungs in other animals; he recurs also several times to the importance of leaves as organs for the elaboration of the food.
If we compare Malpighi's theory of the nutrition of plants with the views of his predecessors, we cannot help seeing, that it was an entirely new creation, in which Aristotelian doctrines had no share. If his successors had apprehended the important and essential points in his doctrine and had striven by experimenting on living plants to support and illustrate them by new facts, we should have been spared many erroneous notions which established themselves in the theory, and made it a perfect chaos of misconceptions. That particular misconception, which we have already mentioned more than once, namely, that Malpighi, like Major and Perrault after him, assumed a continuous circulation of the juices of the plant, necessarily involved an incorrect idea of the function of the leaves ; that function was by many later writers either quite neglected, or sought for chiefly in transpiration, the chemical activity of the leaves being quite overlooked.
Malpighi's theory can hardly be said to take into consideration the chemical nature of the food of plants; it is chiefly occupied with the relation of the organs to the main points in the nutritive process ; its foundations are for the most part ​ laid in the anatomy of the plant. Grew, who in all essential points adopted Malpighi's views, but without doing much to advance them by his lengthy discussions on particular questions, made some attempt to extend the knowledge of the chemistry of the subject; but his notions were entirely borrowed from the corpuscular theory of Descartes, and he may be said to have constructed his own chemical processes; the consequence was that he usually overlooked the points that were of fundamental importance, and brought nothing to light that could assist the further development of the theory of nutrition. But there is another writer, whose name is in the present day known to few in the history of vegetable physiology, but whose ideas on the chemistry of plants are of great interest. This writer is Mariotte, the discoverer of the well-known law of gases, one of the greatest physicists of the latter half of the 17th century, who also enriched the physiology of the human body with some valuable discoveries. We have a tolerably copious treatise of Mariotte's in the form of a letter to a M. Lantin in the year 1679, to be found in the 'Œuvres de Mariotte,' Leyden, 1717, under the title, 'Sur le sujet des plantes.' It is highly instructive to gather from this letter the ideas of one of the most famous and ablest of the natural philosophers of that day on chemical processes and conditions in the nutrition of plants, a few years after the appearance of Malpighi's great work and about the time that Grew's Phytotomy was being published. It is to be expected that Mariotte should give but an incidental and superficial attention to the more delicate structure of ​
​ Marietta's second hypothesis more specially concerns the chemical nature of plants ; he supposes that several of his principes grossiers are contained in every plant, and he endeavours first to explain their source ; the motes in the air, he says, which when burnt by lightning smell of sulphur, are carried by rain into the earth, and parts of them are taken up into the plant. Moreover distillation in all plants produces a water, which the chemists call phlegma, and also acids and ammonia, and if the residuum is burnt there remains an ash, from which we obtain an earth which is without taste and insoluble in water, and fixed salts ; these salts differ from one another according as they are mixed with more or less acid and ammoniacal spirit or other unknown principles, which the fire could not volatilise. It is not to be wondered at that these principles are found in plants, since they derive their food from the earth which contains them. We see how great has been the advance since the time when Van Helmont believed that he had proved by his experiment, that all the materials in plants come from pure water.
It remained to confront one view of the source of the substances in plants, which was also drawn from the treasure-house of Aristotelian conceptions, and was still in vogue. It was supposed that the very materials of which the plant is composed were contained in their own form in the earth, and had only to be taken up by the roots. Aristotle had himself said: 'Everything feeds on that of which it consists, and everything feeds on more than one thing; whatever appears to feed only on one thing, as the plant on water, feeds on more than one thing, for earth in the case of the plant is mixed with the water; therefore the country-people water plants with mixtures of things.' This passage might leave some doubt about Aristotle's view, if we did not find the following: 'As many savours as there are in the rinds of fruits, so many it is plain prevail also in the earth. Therefore also many of the old philosophers said, that the water is of as many kinds us the ground through ​ which it runs.' These passages taken with those quoted above show that Aristotle made the substances required for the growth of plants reach them from the earth ready elaborated, as has been before observed; and this view, still maintained in Mariotte's time, may yet be met with among those who are ignorant of physiology. It is interesting then to see, how vigorously Mariotte exposes the incorrectness and absurdity of this idea, though he has no new discovery to help him. In his third hypothesis he maintains, that the salts, earths, oils, and other things, which different species of plants yield by distillation, are always the same, and that the differences are due entirely to the way in which these principes grossiers and their simplest parts are united together or separated, and he proves it thus: If a bonchretien pear is grafted on a wild one, the same sap, which in the wild plant produces indifferent pears, produces good and well-flavoured pears on the graft; and if this graft has a scion from the wild pear again grafted on it, the latter will bear indifferent fruit. This shows that the same sap in the stem assumes different qualities in each graft. But still more forcible is his proof of the fact, that plants do not take their substance direct from the earth, but produce it themselves by chemical processes. Take a pot, he says, with seven to eight pounds of earth and grow in it any plant you like; the plant will find in this earth and in the rain-water which has fallen on it all the principles of which it is composed in its mature state. You may put three or four thousand different kinds of plants in this earth; if the salts, oils, earths were different in each species of plant, all these principles must be contained in the small quantity of earth and rain-water which falls upon it in the course of three or four months, which is impossible; for each of these plants would yield in the mature state a dram of fixed salt at least and two drams of ​ earth, and all these principles together with those which are mixed with the water would weigh at least from two to three ounces, and this multiplied by four thousand, the number of the species of plants, would give a weight of five hundred pounds.
These arguments like those of Jung, and in the main also those of Malpighi, rested on facts which were on the whole as well known in ancient times as in the 17th century; but no one had before given heed to considerations, which were in themselves quite sufficient to do away with the Aristotelian teaching on the subject of the nutrition of plants.
​ Mariotte concluded that the primary sap finds its way into the plant through the leaves as well as through the roots from the fact, that if a branch is taken from a tree, and one of its smaller branches kept in water, another will remain fresh for some days; the conclusion was not quite justified, as the future showed. His remarks on the necessity of sunlight to nutrition, on the ripening of fruit, and other matters, rests on very imperfect experience and need not be noticed.
The characteristic and the important point in Mariotte's theory of nutrition is the marked contrast between his point of view in natural science and the Aristotelian and scholastic doctrines still widely diffused, and thus he is led to declare war also against Aristotle's vegetable soul. He connects his remarks on this point with a fact which excites his astonishment, namely that every species of plant reproduces its properties so exactly; no explanation of this fact, he says, is gained by the assumption of a vegetable soul, of which no one knows what it is. He declares as decidedly against the theory of evolution, also much in vogue in his day. In opposition to the notion that all future generations are shut up one inside another in the seeds of a plant, he thinks it much more probable that the seeds only contain the essential substances, and that their influence on the crude sap brings about the successive formation of the rest of the constituents of the plant, a view which we may still allow to be correct. He regards the whole process of nutrition and life in plants as a play of physical forces, as the combination and separation of simple substances, but he believes at the same time that he can prove the commonly received doctrine of spontaneous generation to be a necessary conclusion from this view. On this point he went wrong from want of sufficient and well-sifted experience, for he regarded it as a proof of generatio spontanea that numerous plants spring up from the soil thrown out from ditches and swamps that have been laid dry. 'We may therefore suppose,' he says, ' that there are in the air, in the water, ​ and in the earth an infinite number of minute bodies so fashioned that two or three uniting together may make the beginning of a plant, and represent the seed of such a plant, if they find a soil favourable to their growth. But it is not probable that this little complex body contains already all the branches, leaves, fruits, and seeds of this plant, and still less that this seed contains all the branches, leaves, flowers, etc., which proceed ad infinitum from the first germination.' The contrary he thinks is proved by the fact, that a rose-bush which has lost its leaves in the winter may produce in the next year nothing but leafy shoots from its flower buds, which shows that the blossoms were not previously formed in those buds, and that a similar conclusion is to be drawn from another fact, that the seeds of one and the same fruit-tree or of a melon produce descendants that differ from one another by variation; here we have an argument against the theory of evolution much more to the purpose than the greater part of those which were alleged against it before Koelreuter obtained his hybrids.
Other prejudices also of his day were opposed by Mariotte, and on good grounds; the medicinal effects, commonly known as the 'virtutes' of plants, played an important part in the botany, and still more in the medicine and chemistry of that time. He rejects the old theory of heat and cold, moisture and dryness, things supposed to be essentially immanent qualities of the substance of plants and used to explain their medicinal effects, and pointing to the fact, that poisonous plants grow in the same soil as harmless ones and side by side with them, he concludes, as he had before concluded, that different plants do not derive their peculiar constituents immediately from the soil, but that they form them themselves by separation and combination of the common principles. Finally he declared against one of the grossest errors which had come down from the previous century, the 'signatura plantarum,' which supposed that the medicinal properties of plants could be deduced from their external features, and especially from resemblances between ​ their organs and the organs of the human body. Mariotte insists that the medicinal properties of plants are to be ascertained by trying them on sick people.
Mariotte's letter, the most important parts of which have here been given, presents us with a lively picture of the views which prevailed in the second half of the 17th century respecting the life of plants; it shows at the same time how an eminent investigator of nature, adopting the principles of a more modern philosophy and knowing how to make a skilful use of the facts that were known to him, was led to oppose antiquated error, the result of prepossessions and want of reflection. If we combine the views of Malpighi on the internal economy of the plant, derived chiefly from its anatomy, with the chemical and physical disquisitions of Mariotte, we have an entirely new theory of the nutrition of plants, not only antagonistic to the Aristotelian doctrine, but distinguished from it by a much greater wealth of ideas and by more sagacious combinations.
These two men had in truth discovered all the principles of vegetable life and nutrition, which could have been discovered in the existing condition of phytotomy and chemistry; Mariotte especially had succeeded in applying the very best that was to be obtained from the uncertain chemical knowledge of his day to the explanation of the phenomena of vegetation. Chemistry was at that time beginning to set herself free from the notions of the medical science, the iatro-chemistry of a former age, only to throw herself into the arms of the theory of the phlogiston; and how little she could contribute to the explanation of the processes of nutrition in plants, how little the methods then in use were adapted to the examination of organised bodies, may be learnt from a little book published in 1676 and again in 1679, 'Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des plantes,' which appeared indeed in Dodart's name, but which was compiled and approved by the body of members of the Academy of Paris. It contains no results of investigation, ​ but a detailed scheme for researches into botanical science, and more particularly into the chemical part of it. There we read, that plants must be burnt slowly, in order that the destroying and transmuting power of the fire may have less effect; the 'virtutes plantarum' play an important part in the chemical examination of plants, and blood was mixed with their juices, in order to discover their properties. A writer named Dedu in a treatise, 'De 1'ame des plantes' (1685) derived the generation and growth of plants from the fermentation and effervescence of the acids in combination with the alkalies, as Kurt Sprengel informs us. It is by comparison with these and similar notions that we recognise the full superiority of the utterances of Malpighi and Mariotte respecting the nutrition of plants, and their sagacity is still further shown by the fact, that there are some things which they forebore to say, evidently because they thought that they were not clearly proved.
The views of Malpighi and Mariotte on the nutrition of plants were respected and often quoted by their contemporaries and immediate successors; but as has happened in other cases unfortunately up to recent times, much that was fundamentally important and significant in them was neglected from the first for comparatively unimportant matters, and the views of these clear thinkers were so mixed up with indistinct ideas and actual misconceptions, that no real advance was made, though a variety of new facts were from time to time brought to light. It has been already noticed that Malpighi's correct idea of the connection of the leaves with the nutrition of the plant was at a later time commonly supposed to be equivalent to Major's theory of circulation, and since the latter was for various reasons considered to be incorrect, it was thought that Malpighi's view was dismissed with it. Yet even Major's theory deserved the preference over the views of those who assumed only an ascent of the sap in the wood, because it at least attempted to account for certain phenomena ​ of growth. It found a new supporter in 1680 in the person of Claude Perrault, who does not however appear to have added anything essentially new to Malpighi's conclusive arguments for a returning sap. Nor did his opponent Magnol in his very weak treatise published in 1709 succeed in saying anything that will bear examination against the theory of circulation, which he too ascribed to Malpighi.
Among the phenomena of vegetation in woody plants, there is scarcely one so striking as the outflow of watery sap from wounded vines and from some tree-stems in the spring. This phenomenon, like the outflow of milky juice, gum, resin and the like, could not fail to be regarded with lively interest by those who occupied themselves with vegetable physiology in the 17th century. Even supposing the movements of water in the wood and of the milky and other juices in their passages not to be necessary accompaniments of the nutrition of plants, yet it was natural that the physiologists of the 17th century should see in them striking proofs of that movement of the sap which is connected with nutrition, and should therefore make them a subject of study. It might also seem to them that the problem in question was easy to solve, for it was not till long after that it came to be understood that these movements are in reality one of the most difficult questions of vegetable physiology. We discover the interest taken in these matters from a series of communications in the form of letters from Dr. Tonge, Francis Willoughby, and especially from Dr. Martin Lister, to be found in the Philosophical Transactions for 1670. The phenomenon to which these men chiefly directed their attention was just the one best calculated to ​ lead to misconceptions respecting the movements of water in woody plants, namely that which is known as the bleeding of the wood in winter, and which depends on entirely different causes from those which produce the weeping of the vine and other woody plants in spring ; but the two things were supposed to be identical, and hence arose an unfortunate confusion of ideas. Lister indeed showed that it is possible to force water out of the wood of a portion of a branch cut from a tree in winter time by warming it artificially, and then to cause the water to be sucked in again by cooling it ; but it was reserved for a modern physiologist to prove that this phenomenon has nothing to do with the bleeding of cut stems from root-pressure, and cannot be used to explain it.
​ Some years elapsed before Hales' labours added materially to the progress which had been already made in the study of these processes in vegetation. His important services to vegetable physiology close our present period, but before we pass on to them, we must first notice a few less important writers. The pages of Woodward and Beale on transpiration and the absorption of water are not very valuable contributions to the theory of nutrition. The fact stated by Woodward, that a Mentha growing in water took up and discharged by evaporation through the leaves forty-six times as much water as it retained in itself, was perhaps the most important of all that he discovered, but his own conclusions from it were of no value.
None of Malpighi's doctrines had from the first excited so much attention as the one which makes the air which is necessary for the respiration of the plant circulate in the spiral vessels of the wood, as it does in the tracheae in insects; while Grew and Ray after him agreed with Malpighi in the main, his countryman Sbaraglia in 1704 ventured even to deny the existence of such vessels, and before long phytotomy was fallen into such a state of decadence that the question, whether there were any vessels, or as they were then called spiral vessels, at all, was repeatedly affirmed and as often denied again, and ultimately it was thought better in the interest of physiological questions to take counsel of experiment rather than of the microscope. Thus in 1715 Nieuwentyt endeavoured with the help of the air-pump to make the air contained in the vessels issue in a visible form under a fluid. Here we again encounter the philosopher Christian Wolff as a zealous representative of vegetable physiology in Germany ; in the third part of his work, 'Allerhand niitzliche Versuche,' 1721, among other experiments he mentions some which confirmed the presence of air in plants; the question was more interesting, in the state in which physics and chemistry then were, than that of the anatomical character of the air-conducting organs. ​ Wolff submitted leaves lying in water containing no air to the vacuum of the air-pump, and saw air-bubbles issue, especially on the under side; but when he allowed the atmospheric pressure to come into play again the leaves became filled with water, and a piece of fir-wood treated in a similar manner sank after the infiltration. In similar' experiments with apricots air issued from the rind and especially from the stalk. Wolff's pupil Thiimmig described similar experiments in his ' Griindliche Erlauterung der merkwiirdigsten Begebenheiten in der Natur,' 1723, and both continued in this question, as in all their physiological and phytotomical views, faithful adherents of Malpighi, as it was wisest then to be. We must linger a moment longer over Christian Wolff, because he published a few years later a general view of the nutrition of plants in a popular form. Wolff's services in the dissemination of natural science in Germany seem not to have been as highly appreciated up to the present time as they deserve to be; his various works on natural science, some of which took a wide range and were partly founded on his own observations, were full of matter and for his time very instructive; they contributed moreover to introduce more liberal habits of thought at a time when gross superstitions, such as that of palingenesia, reigned even among men who published scientific treatises in the German Academy of Sciences (the 'Acta of the Leopoldina).' If Wolff's own scientific researches show more good will than skill, yet he had an advantage over many others in a really philosophical training, a habit of abstract thought which enabled him to fix with certainty on what was fundamentally important in the observations of others, and thus to expound the scientific knowledge of his day from higher points of view. For this reason his work which appeared in 1723, ' Verniinftige Gedanken von den Wirkungen der Natur,' deserves recognition. It is a work of the kind which would now be called a ' Kosmos,' and treats of the physical qualities of bodies generally, of the heavenly bodies and specially of our own planet, of meteor​ ology, physical geography, and lastly of minerals, plants, animals and men. In accordance with his chief object, general instruction, it is written in German and in a good homely style, and contains the best information that was at that time to be obtained on scientific subjects ; among these he gives an account of the processes of nutrition in plants, in which he made careful and intelligent use of all that had been written on the subject, bringing together all the serviceable material which he could gather from Malpighi, Grew, Leeuwenhoek, Van Helmont, Mariotte and others into a connected system, and occasionally introducing pertinent critical remarks. If we consider the state of scientific literature in Germany in the first years of the 18th century, we shall be inclined to assign as great merit to comprehensive text-books of this popular character as to new investigations and minor discoveries. Wolff's chapter on nutrition has however a special interest for us, because it contains several observations of value which were lost sight of after his time. These refer chiefly to the chemistry of nutrition and touch many problems which were not solved before our time ; for instance, the statement that it is a well-known fact that the earth loses its fruitfulness, if much is grown on it; that it requires much to feed it, and must be manured with dung or ashes ; in these few words we have the questions of the exhaustion of the soil, and the restitution of the substances taken from it by the crop, brought into notice by Wolff at this early period. ’It should be particularly noted,' continues Wolff, 'how fruitful nitre makes the soil; Vallemont has praised the usefulness of nitre, and has mentioned other things which have a like operation by reason of their saline and oily particles, such as horn from the horns and hoofs of animals; dung likewise contains saline and oily particles, which are present in the ash also, and we see therefore that such particles should not be wanting, if a plant is to be fed from water. The seed also, which supplies the first food of the plant, shows the same thing, for there are none which do ​ not contain oil and salt, and there are many from which the oil may be squeezed out; and oil and salt are found in all plants if they are examined chemically.' He insists on the correctness of the view taken by Malpighi and Mariotte, that the constituents of the food must be chemically altered in the plant. Since every plant, he says, has its own particular salt and its own particular oil, we must readily allow that these are produced in the plant and not introduced into it. But at the same time since plants cannot grow where the soil does not supply them with saline and especially with nitrous particles, it is from these that the salts and oils in the plant must be pro- duced, and the water also changed into a nutritious juice. Further on he alludes to the saline, nitrous and oily particles which float in the air, and says that daily experience shows that most of the substance of putrefying bodies passes into the air, and that if we admit light through a narrow opening into a dark place, we can see a great number of little particles of dust floating about ; water also readily takes up salt and earth, and mineral springs show that metallic particles are mixed with it. There- fore there is no reason to doubt that rain-water also contains a variety of matters which it conveys to the plant. Alluding once more to the chemical changes in the constituents of the food which must be supposed to take place in the plant, he connects the subject with some remarks on the organs of plants, in which he closely follows Malpighi; he says that these changes cannot take place in tubes, beca'use the sap merely rises or falls in them; we can only therefore suppose that it is in the spongy substance (the cellular tissue) that the nutrient sap is elaborated, and accordingly the vesicles or utriculi are a kind of stomach ; but the change in the water can only be this, that the particles of various substances which are in rain-water are separated from it and united together in some special manner, and this cannot be effected without special movements. But his ideas on these movements in the sap are somewhat obscure. He employs the expansion of the ​ air and the capillarity of the woody tubes as his moving forces. He agrees decidedly with those who postulated a returning sap as well as an ascending crude sap, but he appeals in this matter to Major, Perrault, and Mariotte, and not to Malpighi; yet like Malpighi he notices the growth of trees set upside down as a proof that the juices can move in opposite directions in the conducting organs, and with Mariotte he ascribes the enlargement of growing organs to the expanding power of the juices which force their way into them.
But these well-meant efforts on the part of Christian Wolff, and indeed all that was done from Malpighi and Mariotte to Ingen-Houss to advance the knowledge of the nutrition of plants, was thrown into the shade by the brilliant investigations of Stephen Hales, in whom we see once more the genius of discovery and the sound original reasoning powers of the great explorers of nature in Newton's age. His 'Statical Essays,' first published in 1727, reappeared in two new editions in English, and afterwards in French, Italian and German translations; in the last with a preface by Christian Wolff. This was the first work devoted to a more complete account of the nutrition of plants and of the movements of the sap in them, and while it noticed what had been already written on the subject, it was chiefly composed of the author's own investigations. An abundance of new experiments and observations, ​ measurements and calculations combine to form a living picture of the whole subject. Malpighi endeavoured to discover the physiological functions of organs by the aid of analogies and a reference to their structure; Mariotte discerned the main features of the connection between plants and their environment by combining together physical and chemical facts ; Hales may be said to have made his plants themselves speak ; by means of cleverly contrived and skilfully managed experiments he compelled them to disclose the forces that were at work in them by effects made apparent to the eye, and thus to show that forces of a very peculiar kind are in constant activity in the quiet and apparently passive organs of vegetation. Penetrated with the spirit of Newton's age, which notwithstanding its strictly ideological and even theological conception of nature did endeavour to explain all the phenomena of life mechanically by the attraction and repulsion of material particles, Hales was not content with giving a clear idea of the phenomena of vegetation, but sought to trace them back to mechanico-physical laws as then understood. He infused life into the empirical materials which he collected by means of ingenious reflections, which brought individual facts into connection with more general considerations. Such a book necessarily attracted great attention, and for us it is a source of much valuable instruction on matters of detail, though we now gather up the phenomena of vegetation into a somewhat differently connected whole.
His investigations into transpiration and the movement of water in the wood were greeted with the warmest approbation. He measured the quantity of water sucked in by the roots and given off by the leaves, compared this with the supply of moisture contained in the earth, and endeavoured to calculate the rapidity with which the water rises in the stem, and to compare it with the rapidity of its entrance into the roots and its exit by the leaves. The experiments, by which he showed the force of suction in wood and roots, and that of the root​ pressure in the case of the bleeding vine, were particularly striking and instructive. His measurements and the figures, on which he founded his calculations, were not so exact as they were often at a later time supposed to be, but he was himself satisfied with obtaining round, approximative numbers ; these under given circumstances supplied a sufficient basis for propositions which were new and afforded a certain amount of insight into the economy of the plant. This mode of proceeding showed his understanding; for the case of living bodies is different from that of metals and gases; in these we seek for constants which can then be inserted in general formulae, and to which therefore the nicest accuracy is applied; but in plants we have to deal with individual cases, and it is from a right interpretation of the measurements taken from them that we can arrive at general laws of vegetation.
To show that the forces of suction and pressure which operate in plants are not something sui generis, but prevail also in dead matter, in other words that they are an example of the general attraction of matter, a subject of particular interest at that time, Hales observed the absorption of water by substances with fine pores; and measured the force employed. These processes he compared with the force which swelling peas exert on the obstacles which they encounter, and thus obtained a more correct idea of the forces concerned in the movement of water in the plant than that given by the capillarity of glass-tubes, which Mariotte and Ray had employed to illustrate them.
Hales failed to appreciate the value of Malpighi's observations on the function of leaves, and was induced by the copiousness of the evaporation of water from their surfaces to overrate the physiological importance of that process; hence he saw in leaves chiefly organs of transpiration, which raise the sap by suction from the roots through the stem. In accordance with this view he denied the existence of a descending sap in the bark, and only admitted that the ascending sap ​ in the wood might possibly sink in the night in consequence of the lowering of the temperature, like the quicksilver in a thermometer, and that so far there might be a return-movement. This was the weak point in Hales' system.
One of his most important discoveries has generally been overlooked even in modern times, probably because it was entirely neglected by his successors in the 18th century; he was the first who proved, that air co-operates in the building up the body of the plant, in the formation of its solid substance, and that gaseous constituents contribute largely to the nourishment of the plant; consequently that neither water, nor the substances which it carries with it from the earth, alone supply the material of which plants are composed, as had been generally imagined. He showed also with the aid of the air-pump, and better than Nieuwentyt and Wolff, that air enters the plant not only through the leaves but also through apertures in the rind, and circulates in the cavities of the wood. He then connected this with the fact which he had confirmed by numerous experiments, that large quantities of 'air' are obtained from vegetable substance by fermentation and dry distillation ; the air thus set free by fermentation and heat must in his opinion be condensed and changed to a solid condition during the period of vegetation. He says in chap. 7, that we find by chemical analysis (dry distillation) of vegetables, that their substance is composed of sulphur, volatile salt, water and earth ; these principles are all endowed with mutual power of attraction (of their parts). But air also enters into the composition of the plant, and this in its solid state is powerfully attractive, but in an elastic condition has the highest powers of repulsion. It is on infinitely various combinations, actions, and reactions of these principles that all activity in animal and vegetable bodies depends. In nutrition the sum of the forces of attraction is greater than that of the forces of repulsion, and thus the viscid ductile parts are first produced, and then by evaporation of the water ​ the harder parts. But if the latter again absorb water, and the forces of repulsion consequently gain the preponderance, then the consistence of the vegetable parts is dissolved, and this decomposition restores to them the power of forming new vegetable products ; therefore the stock of nutritive substance in nature can never be exhausted ; this stock is the same in animals and plants, and is fitted by a small change of texture to feed the one or the other.
He goes on to say, that it results from his experiments, that leaves are very useful for the nourishing of the plant, inasmuch as they draw up the food from the earth ; but they seem also to be adapted to other noble and important services; they remove the superfluous water by evaporation, retaining the parts of it that are nutritious, while they also absorb salt, nitre, and the like substances, and dew, and rain ; and since, like Newton, he regarded light as a substance, he concludes by asking: 'may not light, which makes its way into the outer surfaces of leaves and flowers, contribute much to the refining of the substances in the plant?'
It might be gathered from these expressions that Hales attributed importance for purposes of nutrition only to the substances suspended in the air; but this was not the case; for we read in the 6th chapter, that he had proved by experiment that a quantity of true permanently elastic air is obtained from vegetable and animal bodies by fermentation and dissolution (dry distillation); the air is to a great extent immediately and firmly incorporated with the substance of these bodies, and it follows therefore that a large quantity of elastic air must be constantly used in forming them.
But Hales not only regards the air as a nourishing substance, but he sees also in its elasticity, which counteracts the attraction of other substances, the origin of the force which maintains the internal movements in the plant. He says that if all matter were endowed only with forces of attraction, all nature would at once contract into an inactive ​ mass; it was therefore absolutely necessary in order to set in movement and animate this huge mass of attracting matter, that a sufficient quantity of strongly repellent and elastic matter should be mixed with it; and since a large portion of these elastic particles are constantly changing to a solid condition through the attraction of the other parts, they must be endowed with the power of again assuming their elastic condition, when they are set free from the attracting mass. Thus the formation and dissolution of animal and vegetable bodies go on in constant succession. Air is therefore very important to the production and growth of animals and plants in two ways; it invigorates their juices while it is in the elastic state, and contributes much to the firm union of the constituent parts, when it has become fixed.
​ Hales is the last of the great naturalists who laid the foundations of vegetable physiology. Strange as some of their ideas may seem to us, yet these observers were the first who gained any deep insight into the hidden machinery of vegetable life, and handed down to us a knowledge both of individual facts and of their most important relations. If we compare what was known before Malpighi's time with the contents of Hales' book, we shall be astonished at the rapid advance made in less than sixty years, while scarcely anything had been contributed to the subject in the period between Aristotle and Malpighi.
3. Fruitless attempts to explaiA the movement of the sap in plants. 1730-1780.
If those, who studied the nutrition of plants and especially the movement of their sap in the period between Hales and Ingen-Houss, had kept a firm hold on Malpighi's view, that the nutritive substances are elaborated in the leaves, and had combined it with Hales' idea, that plants derive a large portion of their substance from the air, they would have had a principle to guide them in their investigations into the movement of the sap; and by experimenting on living plants they might have succeeded in giving a more definite expression to these ideas, even though chemistry and physics supplied during that time no new aids. We have said already that such was not the course of events; physiologists confined their attention to the obvious phenomena of vegetation, and trusted in so doing to gain a firmer footing, but in this they never got beyond a commonplace and unreflecting empiricism, because their observation was without an object, and their conclusions without a principle. They wandered from the right direction, as always happens when observation is not guided by a well-considered hypothesis; and their conceptions were rendered more obscure by their imperfect acquaintance with one of the most important aids to understanding the movement of the ​ sap, namely the structure of the more delicate parts of the plant, the knowledge of which had not advanced since the days of Malpighi and Grew. Since most of them made no phytotomical investigations of their own, and only partially understood the descriptions of those writers, they had to be content with misty and often quite inaccurate ideas of the inner structure of wood and bark, and yet expected to obtain an insight into the movement of the sap in them. In reading the writings of Malpighi, Grew, Mariotte, Hales and even Wolff, notwithstanding many mistakes in details we find a pleasure in the connected reasoning, and in the sagacity which knew how to distinguish between what was important and what was not ; whereas the observers, whom we have now to mention, give us only isolated statements, nor have we the satisfaction of feeling that we are conversing with men of superior understanding.
We may pass over the unimportant writings of Friedrich Walther (1740), Anton Wilhelm Platz (1751) and Rudolph Bohmer (1753), as merely barren exercises; but some notice should be taken of those of De la Baisse and Reichel, since these authors at least endeavoured to bring to light something new. But the method which they employed of making living plants suck up coloured fluids was calculated to give rise to serious errors both at the time and afterwards. Magnol had mentioned experiments of the kind in 1709, and the Jesuit father Sarrabat, known by the name of De La Baisse, occupied himself with them and described them in a treatise, 'Sur la circulation de la seve des plantes,' 1733, which received a prize from the academy of Bordeaux. He set the roots of different plants in the red juice of the fruit of Phytolacca, and found that in two or three days the whole of the bark of the roots and especially the tips of the root-fibres were coloured ​ red inside. It was a natural conclusion at that time, that it was these parts which chiefly absorbed the red colouring matter, and in fact this opinion was maintained till quite recent times, and it was on such results that Pyrame de Candolle founded his theory of the spongioles of the root, which is still accepted in France. At present it is known, that the bark and especially the youngest tips of the fibres of the root are not coloured under these circumstances, until they have been first poisoned and killed by the colouring matter; these experiments therefore, which have been frequently repeated since De la Baisse's time, prove nothing respecting the action of living roots, but they were from the first the cause of a pernicious error in vegetable physiology, which as we shall see gave rise to others also. One result however of De la Baisse's experiments was less misleading; he placed the cut ends of branches of woody plants in the coloured fluid, and found that not only the general body of the wood, but the woody bundles which pass from it into the leaves and parts of the flowers, were coloured red, while the succulent tissue of the bark and leaves remained uncoloured. It appeared therefore that the red juice passed only through the wood, and a somewhat bold analogy might lead to the further conclusion that this is true also of the nutrient substances dissolved in the watery sap; but the view so stated is not at present considered to be correct, and that the sap which ascends from the roots to the leaves, the water especially, is conveyed through the wood only, and not through the rind, had been already sufficiently proved by the experiments of Hales and others. The uncritical treatment of experiments of this kind by Georg Christian Reichel afterwards led to new errors, though his dissertation, 'De vasis plantarum spiralibus,' shows to advantage by the side of similar productions of the day ​ owing to its careful notices of the literature, and the author's original researches in phytotomy. Reichel was not satisfied with the arguments of Malpighi, Nieuwentyt, Wolff, Thümmig and Hales for the view 'that the vessels of the wood contain air. He observed quite correctly, that if branches are cut off from woody and herbaceous plants and the cut surfaces are placed in red decoction of brazil-wood, the red colouring matter spreads through all the vascular bundles, even those of the flowers and fruit; but on examination with the microscope he found the red fluid to some extent in the cavities of the vessels, and hastily concluded that they too in the natural condition convey sap and not air. His description and his drawing show however, that only some vessels had received any of the red fluid and that none of these were filled with it. Reichel and the many who repeated his statements forgot to ask whether the vessels had contained air or fluid before the experiment, or whether the result would have been the same, if plants with uninjured and living roots had absorbed the coloured fluid, and no divided vessels had therefore come in contact with it. There was no reason why observers of that day should not have been alive to the simple consider- ation, that the vessels of a branch parted from the stem and placed in a fluid must necessarily show the capillary action of narrow glass tubes if they are filled with air in their natural condition, and that in the experiment the transpiration of the leaves must favour the ascent of the red juice in the cavities of the vessels, as was to be gathered from other and better experiments made by Hales. But these obvious reflections were not made; the supposed results of the experiment were heedlessly accepted, and the unfounded notion, that vessels are natural sap-conducting organs, was set up in opposition to the trustworthy decision of Malpighi and Grew, that they convey air. Thus on the strength of badly interpreted experiments one of the most important of physiological discoveries was called in question, and a hundred years later there were persons, ​ who, relying on the same experiments as Reichel, supposed that the vessels of the wood convey the ascending sap, a view which made it impossible from the first to arrive at any real understanding of the movement of the sap in plants provided with organs of transpiration. But even the other great discovery which we owe to Malpighi, that leaves are organs for elaborating the food, was denied by Bonnet, who substituted for it the utterly false view, that they chiefly serve to absorb rain-water and dew. Bonnet, who had previously done good service to insect-biology, and had discovered the asexual propagation of aphides, having injured his eyes in these studies, found an agreeable pastime in a variety of experiments on plants. Much that he did was unimportant, yet he obtained some results, which could afterwards be turned to account by more competent persons, for the weakness of his own judgment is shown even in his more serviceable observations, such as those on the curvature of growing plants. We notice the same defect in his observations on the part played by leaves in the nutrition of the plant. It shows the character of the time that a book like Bonnet's 'Recherches sur l'usage des feuilles des plantes,' a mere accumulation of undigested facts, should have been generally considered an important production. He tells us, that his attention was called by Calandrini to the fact, that the structure of the under side of leaves seems to show that they were intended to absorb 'the dew that rises from the ground' and introduce it into the plant. Starting from this sensible suggestion, as he calls it, he proceeded to make a variety of senseless experiments ​ with leaves, which were cut off from their plants, and having been smeared over with oil or other hurtful substances were laid on water, some on their upper some on their under side, the object being to note the time which they took to perish. It is impossible to imagine worse-devised experiments on vegetation; for if Bonnet wished to test Calandrini's 'sensible' conjecture, he ought certainly to have left the leaves on the living plants and have observed the effect of the supposed absorption of dew on the vegetation. It is to be observed, that by rising dew he evidently meant aqueous vapour, for the real dew descends chiefly on the upper side of the leaf; and what could he have expected to learn by laying cut leaves on water? how could this prove that leaves absorb dew? Nevertheless Bonnet came to the conclusion that the most important function of leaves was to absorb dew, and in order to make this result agree with Hales' investigations on transpiration, he propounded the theory, that the sap which rises by day from the roots into the stem is carried by the woody fibres assisted by the air-tubes into the under side of the leaves, where there are many stomata to facilitate its exit (evaporation). At the approach of night, when the leaves and the air in the air-tubes are no longer under the influence of heat, the sap returns to the roots; then the under side of the leaves commences its other function; the dew slowly rising from the earth strikes against it, condenses upon it, and is detained there by the fine hairs and by other contrivances (this really takes place to a much greater extent on the upper side). The fine tubes of the leaves absorb it at once, (this is evidently not so, since the dew increases in quantity till sunrise), and conduct it to the branches, whence it passes into the stem. He thought so highly of this strange theory, that he believed he found in it a teleological explanation of the heliotropic and geotropic curvature of leaves and stems, two things which ​ he did not distinguish, and of the position of leaves on the stem. Bonnet's view of the functions of leaves, foolish as it is, is historically important and therefore required to be noticed, because it was really accepted during many years in preference to the older and better ideas, and because it shows how the power of judging of such matters had fallen off since Malpighi's time. It appears to have been the praise lavished on Bonnet by his contemporaries that made later physiologists, who might have known better, take him for an authority on the nutrition of plants. His experiments on the growth of plants in another material than earth are if possible more worthless than those with cut leaves. Here too the idea was not his own; for hearing that land-plants had been grown in Berlin in moss instead of earth, he made numerous experiments of the kind, and found that many plants grow vigorously in this way, and bloom and bear seed. But the theory of nutrition gained nothing by these experiments, which were only a childish amusement. The few pages which Malpighi wrote on the nutrition of plants are worth more than all Bonnet's book on the use of leaves; the former by the help of some simple considerations and conclusions from analogy really discovered the use of leaves; Bonnet on the faith of many unmeaning experiments ascribed to them another function than the true one.
We are unable to pass a much more favourable judgment on the views respecting the nutrition of plants of another writer, who otherwise did good service to vegetable physiology, and to whom we shall return in our last chapter. It is true that Du Hamel, of whom we speak, was not an investigator of ​ nature, as were Malpighi, Mariotte or Hales; compared with those great thinkers he was only a compiler, and a somewhat uncritical one. But he was not a dilettante in science, like Bonnet; he made the vegetable world the subject of serious and diligent study, and he endeavoured to turn the results of that study to practical account. Long familiarity with plants gave him a kind of instinct for the truth in dealing with them, as is shown in his observations and experiments, many of which are still instructive; but he had neither that faculty of combination which can alone bring a meaning out of experiments and observations in physiological investigations, nor the power to distinguish between matters of fundamental and secondary importance. So thinks also his biographer Du Petit-Thonars.
The merits and the faults here mentioned are combined in an especial degree in Du Hamel's most famous work, 'Physique des arbres,' which appeared in two volumes in 1758 and is a text-book of vegetable anatomy and physiology with numerous plates. His remarks on the nutrition of plants and the movement of the sap are a lengthy compilation chiefly from Malpighi, Mariotte and Hales, though he has not succeeded in appropriating .exactly that which is theoretically important or adopting the most commanding points of view. He introduces the results of his own experiments into his account, and these are often instructive in themselves, but are never made use of to establish a definite view with respect to the connection between the processes of nutrition. He hits upon the right view only when he is dealing with plain and obvious matters; for instance, he restores the vessels of the wood to their old rights, and concludes from experiments, as had been already done in the 17th century, that an elaborated sap moves in the reverse direction in the rind; ​ so too he perceives that if bulbs, tubers, and roots, with or without the help of water which they have absorbed, produce shoots and even flowers, this must be done at the expense of material laid up in reserve, but he does not turn this fact to any further account. But he utterly spoilt the best part of his subject ; he made the leaves nothing but pumps that suck up the sap from the roots; he quotes Malpighi's better view as a curiosity, and never mentions it again; but he accepts Bonnet's unfortunate theory, though he himself adduces many facts, which make for Malpighi's interpretation of the leaves. He is almost more unsuccessful with chemical points in nutrition; he repeats Mariotte's statements with regard to the necessity of a chemical change in the nutrient substances in the plant, and even supplies further proof of it ; but he cannot shake off the Aristotelian dogma, that the earth like an animal stomach elaborates the food of plants, and that the roots absorb the elaborated matter like chyle-vessels (II. pp. 189, 230). He concludes from his own attempts to grow land-plants without earth and in ordinary water that the latter supplies the plant with very little matter in solution, but he makes no use of Hales' statements with regard to the co-operation of the air in the building up of the plant, and ends by saying (II. p. 204) that he only wished to prove that the purest and simplest water can supply plants with their food, which his experiments do not prove. Thus almost all that Du Hamel says on the nutrition of plants is a mixture of right observations in detail with wrong conclusions, and reflections which never rise above the individual facts and give no account of the connection of the whole. These faults appear in a still higher degree in a later and almost more comprehensive work, the 'Traite theorique et pratique de la vegetation' of Mustel (1781). The further the distance from the founders of vegetable physiology, the larger were the books that were written on the subject; but the thread that held the single facts together became thinner and thinner, till at last it broke. ​ The theory of nutrition, like a forced plant, needed light that it might recover strength. This light came with the discoveries of Ingen-Houss, and with the mighty strides made by chemistry after 1760 in the hands of Lavoisier.
4. The modern theory of nutrition founded by Ingen-Houss and Theodore de Saussure. 1779-1804.
The two cardinal points in the doctrine of the nutrition of plants, namely that the leaves are the organs which elaborate the food, and that a large part of the substance of the plant is derived from the atmosphere, were established, as we have seen, by Malpighi and Hales, and employed by them in framing their theory; it remained to supply a direct and tangible proof of the fact that the green leaves take up a constituent of the atmosphere and apply it to purposes of nutrition. It was evidently the want of such direct proof which caused the successors of the first great physiologists to overlook the importance of the propositions thus obtained by deduction, and so to grope their way in the dark with no principle to guide them.
The discoveries of Priestley, Ingen-Houss and Senebier, and the quantitative determinations of de Saussure in the years between 1774 and 1804, supplied the proof that the green parts of plants, and the leaves therefore especially, take up and decompose a constituent of the air, while they at the same time assimilate the constituents of water and increase in weight in a corresponding degree; but that this process only goes on copiously and in the normal way, when small quantities of mineral matter are introduced at the same time into the plant through the roots. The discoveries and facts, from which this doctrine proceeded, were those which overthrew the theory of the phlogiston, and from which Lavoisier deduced the principles of modern chemistry; the new theory of the nutrition of plants was indeed directly due to Lavoisier's doctrines, and it is necessary therefore to take at least a hasty glance at the ​ revolution which was effected in chemistry between 1770 and 1790. It is a well-known fact that this revolution dates from the discovery of oxygen-gas by Priestley in 1774. Priestley himself was and continued to be a stubborn adherent of the phlogiston; but his discovery was made by Lavoisier the basis of an entirely new view of chemical processes. By the combustion of charcoal and the diamond, Lavoisier proved as early as 1776 that 'fixed air' was a compound of carbon and 'vital air.' In like manner phosphoric acid, sulphuric acid and, after a preliminary discovery by Cavendish, nitric acid also were found to be compounds of phosphorus, sulphur and nitrogen with vital air; in 1777 Lavoisier showed that fixed air and water are produced by the combustion of organic substances, and after establishing within certain limits the quantitative composition of fixed air, he named it carbonic acid, and the gas which had up to that time been known as vital air he called oxygen. Cavendish in 1783 obtained water by the combustion of hydrogen-gas, and then Lavoisier proved that water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. These discoveries not only did away step by step with the old theory of the phlogiston, and supplied the principles of modern chemistry, but they also affected exactly those substances which play the most important part in the nutrition of plants; every one of these discoveries in chemistry could at once be turned to account in physiology. In 1779 Priestley discovered that the green parts of plants occasionally exhale oxygen, and in the same year Ingen-Houss described some fuller investigations, which showed that this only takes place under the influence of light, and that the green parts of plants give off carbon dioxide in the dark, as those parts which are not green do both in the light and the dark. A correct interpretation of these facts was not however possible in 1779 ; it was not till 1785 that Lavoisier ​ succeeded in setting himself quite free from the old notions, and developed his antiphlogistic system into a connected whole. It should be mentioned that he had discovered in 1777 that the respiration of animals is a process of oxidation which produces their internal heat, heat being the product of every form of combustion. This fact was equally important for vegetable physiology, but it was some time before it was used to explain the life of plants.
The establishment of the fact, that parts of plants give off oxygen under certain circumstances, did little or nothing to further the theory of their nutrition; and that was all that vegetable physiology owes to Priestley. Ingen-Houss on the other hand determined the conditions under which oxygen is given off, and further showed that all parts of plants are constantly giving rise to carbon dioxide ; on these facts rests the modern theory of the nutrition and respiration of plants, and we must therefore consider that Ingen-Houss was the founder of that theory. But since we are dealing here with a discovery of more than ordinary importance, it seems necessary to go more closely into the details.
A work of Priestley's appeared in 1779, which was translated into German in the following year under the title, 'Versuche und Beobachtungen über verschiedene Theile der Naturlehre,' and contained among other things the writer's experiments on plants. His way of managing them was eminently unsuitable, nor did he arrive at any definite and important result, though he expressed the idea which had led him to make them clearly enough, where he says, 'If the air exhaled by the plant is of better character (richer in oxygen) than atmospheric air, it follows that the phlogiston of the air is retained in the plant ​and used there for its nourishment, while the part which escapes, being deprived of its phlogiston, necessarily attains a higher degree of purity.' After he had ceased his experiments with plants in 1778, he observed that there was a deposit of matter in the water in some vessels which he had used for them, and that it gave off a very 'pure air'; a number of further observations taught him that this air was given off only under the influence of sun-light; Priestley himself did not suspect that the deposit in question, afterwards known as Priestley's matter and found to consist of Algae, was a vegetable substance.
In the same year (1779) appeared the first book by Ingen-Houss, in which the subject was treated at length; it was called, 'Experiments on Vegetables, discovering their great power of purifying the common air in the sunshine and of injuring it in the shade and at night,' and was at once translated into German, Dutch and French. The title itself shows that the author had observed more and more correctly than Priestley. But he did not come to an understanding of the inner connection of the facts, till Lavoisier completed his new antiphlogistic theory. He says himself in his essay, 'On the nutrition of plants and the fruitfulness of the earth,' which appeared in 1796, and was translated into German with an introduction by A. v. Humboldt in 1798, that when he published his discoveries in 1779, the new system of chemistry was not yet fully declared, and that without its aid he had been unable to deduce the true theory from the facts; but that since the composition of water and air had been discovered, it had become much easier to explain the phenomena of vegetation. But in order to establish his priority he says on p. 56, that he had been fortunate enough to find out the real ​ cause why plants at certain times vitiate the surrounding air, a cause which neither Priestley nor Scheele had suspected. He had discovered, he says, in the summer of 1779, that all vegetables incessantly give out carbonic acid gas, but that the green leaves and shoots only exhale oxygen in sun-light or clear day-light. It appears therefore that Ingen-Houss not only discovered the assimilation of carbon and the true respiration of plants, but also kept the conditions and the meaning of the two phenomena distinct from one another. Accordingly he had a clear idea of the great distinction between the nutrition of germinating plants and of older green ones, the independence of the one, the dependence of the other, on light; and that he considered the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere to be the main if not the only source of the carbon in the plant, is shown by his remark on a foolish assertion of Hassenfratz that the carbon is taken from the earth by the roots; he replied that it was scarcely conceivable that a large tree should in that case find its food for hundreds of years in the same spot. There was a certain boldness in these utterances of Ingen-Houss, and a considerable confidence in his own convictions, for at that time the absolute amount of carbon dioxide in the air had not been 'ascertained, and the small quantity of it in proportion to the other constituents of air would certainly have deterred some persons from seeing in it the supply of the huge masses of carbon which plants accumulate in their structures.
Before Ingen-Houss in the work last mentioned explained the results of his observations of 1779 in accordance with the new chemical views, and laid the foundations of the doctrine of nutrition in plants, Jean Senebier, of Geneva, made pro​ tracted researches into the influence of light on vegetation (1782-1788), and founded on their results a theory of nutrition, which he published in 1800 in a tediously prolix work in five volumes entitled, 'Physiologie végétale.' In this work some valuable matter was concealed in a host of unimportant details and tiresome displays of rhetoric, which for the most part are beside the question. But it must be acknowledged that Senebier was better provided with chemical knowledge than Ingen-Houss, and that he brought together all the scattered facts that the chemical literature of the day offered, in order to obtain a more complete representation of the processes of nutrition. It was of especial importance at that time to insist on the principle that the processes of nutrition within the plant must be judged by the general laws of chemistry; organised beings, said Senebier, are the stage, on which the affinities of the constituents of earth, water, and air mutually influence each other; the decompositions however are generally the result of the influence of light, which separates the oxygen of the carbon dioxide in the green parts of plants. He insists (II. p. 304) upon this among other facts, that the simple constituents of all plants are the same, and the differences are only quantitative. He then brings before us the simple and compound constituents of plants one after the other, and among them light and heat figure as material substances, in accordance with the view of the time. He treats at great length the old question of the meaning of the salts in the plant, and it is ​ instructive to observe how he tries to decide whether the nitrates, sulphates and ammonia, which are found in the sap of plants, are introduced from without, or are formed in them from their constituent elements; he concludes finally that the former is the more probable opinion. That the greater part at least of the carbon of plants comes from the atmosphere could scarcely be a matter of doubt with those who knew the writings of Ingen-Houss; but Senebier devotes special attention to this question; he endeavours to take all the co-operating factors into the calculation, and especially to prove once more that the oxygen given off from the plant in light comes from the carbon dioxide which has been absorbed, that the green parts only and no others are able to effect this decomposition, and that there is a sufficiency of carbon dioxide in nature to supply the food of plants. But although he convinced himself that green leaves decompose the carbon dioxide which surrounds them in a gaseous form, he supposed that it is chiefly through the roots that this substance finds its way with the ascending sap into the leaves, and this view often gave occasion to further error in later writers.
The tedious prolixity of Senebier's book was one reason why it never enjoyed the measure of appreciation and influence which it deserved; but it was also thrown into the shade by the appearance of a work of superior excellence, distinguished at once by the importance of its contents, by condensation of style, and by perspicuity of thought. This work was the 'Recherches chimiques sur la végétation' of Théodore de Saussure (1804), which contained new observations and new ​ results, and what was still more important, a new method. Saussure adopted for the most part the quantitative mode of dealing with questions of nutrition; and as the questions which he put were thus rendered more definite, and his experiments were conducted in a most masterly manner, he succeeded in obtaining definite answers. He knew how to manage his experiments in such a manner that the results were sure to speak plainly for themselves; they had not to be brought out by laborious calculation from those small and, as they are called, exact data, which less skilful experimenters use to hide their own uncertainty. The directness and brevity with which precise quantitative results are expressed, the close reasoning and transparent clearness of thought, impart to the reader of de Saussure's works a feeling of confidence and security such as he receives from scarcely any other writer on these subjects from the time of Hales to our own. The 'Recherches chimiques' have this in common with Hales' 'Statical Essays,' that the statements of facts which they contain have been made use of again and again by later writers for theoretical purposes, while the theoretical connexion between them was constantly overlooked, as we shall have reason to learn in the following section. It is not every one who can follow a work like this, which is no connected didactic exposition of the theory of nutrition, but a series of experimental results which group themselves round the great questions of the subject, while the theoretical connection is indicated in short introductions and recapitulations, and it is left to the reader to form his own convictions by careful study of all the details. It was not de Saussure' intention to teach the science, but to lay its foundations; not to communicate facts, but to establish them; ​ the style therefore, as might be expected, is dry and unattractive; the writer seems to confine himself too anxiously within the limits of what is given in experience, and there is no doubt that many errors in later times might have been avoided if the inductive proof of de Saussure's doctrines had been accompanied with a deductive exposition of them of a more didactic character.
The processes of vegetation examined by de Saussure were, for the most part, the same as those which Ingen-Houss and Senebier had studied at length and correctly described in their general outlines. But de Saussure went beyond this, and by means of quantitative determinations struck a balance between the amount of matter taken up and given off by the plant, thereby showing what it retains. In this way he made two great discoveries: that the elements of water are fixed in the plant at the same time as the carbon, and that there is no normal nutrition of the plant without the introduction of nitrates and mineral matter. But we cannot form a due idea of de Saussure's services to physiology without going further into the detail of his work.
We will first consider his investigations respecting the assimilation of carbon in plants. Here we have the important result, that larger quantities of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surrounding the plants are only favourable to vegetation if the latter are in a condition to decompose them, that is, if they are in sufficiently strong light; that every increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the air in shade or in darkness is unfavourable to vegetation, and that if that increase is greater than eight times in the hundred it is absolutely injurious. On the other hand he found, that the decomposition of carbon dioxide by the green parts in light is an occupation that is necessary to them, that plants die when they are deprived of it. The first clear insight into the chemical processes which accompany the decomposition of carbon dioxide in the interior of the plant was obtained by perceiving, that plants by appro​ printing a definite quantity of carbon make a much more than proportionate addition to their dry substance, and that this is due to the simultaneous fixation of the component parts of water. The full significance of this fact could only be apprehended at a later time, when the theory of the combinations of carbon, organic chemistry, had been further developed. As regards the importance of the decomposition of carbon dioxide by the green organs under the influence of light to the whole nourishment of the plant, de Saussure arrived by more definite proofs than Ingen-Houss had given at the result, that only a small portion of the substance of plants is derived from the constituents of the soil in solution in water, but that the great mass of the vegetable body is built up from the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere and the constituents of water; he convinced himself of this partly by considering the small quantities of matter which the water is able to dissolve from a soil capable of sustaining vegetation, partly by experiments in vegetation and considerations of a more general character.
Not less important were de Saussure's investigations into oxygen-respiration by plants, which taken simply as a fact, had been previously discovered by Ingen-Houss. But de Saussure showed that growth is impossible without this process of respiration, even in germinating plants, though these are rich in assimilated matter. He further showed that green leaves and opening flowers, and generally the parts of plants which are distinguished by greater activity of vital processes, require more oxygen for respiration than those in a less active and resting state. He determined the loss of weight which the organic substance of germinating plants suffers from respiration, and found it to be greater than was proportionate to the weight of carbon exhaled; but the chemical science of his day did not supply him with a certain explanation of this fact. Lastly, de Saussure at a later time (1822) discovered the chief relations between the internal heat of flowers and their consumption of oxygen, and thus we see that he supplied the most important ​ elements in the modern theory of the respiration of plants, though he did not fully explain their mutual connection.
It evidently was the received opinion before the time of Ingen-Houss, and in spite of Hales' views, that plants derive the larger part of their food from the constituents of earth and water. lUit when it became known that the carbon, which is the chief constituent of vegetable substance, comes from the atmosphere, and it was considered that much the larger part of that substance is combustible, it naturally became a question whether the incombustible ingredients which form the ash take any part in the nutrition of plants. This question was by many physiologists answered in the negative; but de Saussure maintained the contrary view. He insisted that certain ingredients, which are found in the ash of all plants, must not be regarded as accidental admixtures, and that the small quantities in which they occur are no proof that they are not indispensable; and he showed from a large number of analyses of vegetable ash, which for a long time were unsurpassed in excellence, that there are certain relations between the presence of certain substances in the ash and the condition of development of the organs of the plant; for instance, he found that young parts of plants capable of development were rich in alkalies and phosphoric acid, while older and inactive portions were richest in lime and silicic acid. Still more important were the experiments in vegetation, by which he showed that plants, whose roots grow not in earth but in distilled water, only take up as much ash-constituents as corresponds with the particles of dust which fall into the water; and further, that the increase in the organic combustible substance of a plant so grown is very insignificant, and consequently that there is no normal vegetation where the plant does not take up ash-constituents in sufficient quantity, a result of the highest importance to the main question. Unfortunately de Saussure neglected to state these results with due emphasis and to point out their fundamental importance, and consequently doubts were enter​ tained even till after 1830 respecting the necessity of the constituents of the ash to vegetation.
It was known in de Saussure's time that nitrogen entered into the substance of living plants; the question was, whence it was obtained. As it was known that four-fifths of the atmosphere consists of nitrogen, it was natural to suppose that it is this which the plant makes use of for forming its nitrogenous substance. De Saussure endeavoured to settle the question by the volumetric method, which, as was afterwards discovered, was not in this case to be trusted. Nevertheless he arrived at the right conclusion, that plants do not assimilate the nitrogen of the atmosphere; this gas must therefore be taken up by the roots in some form of chemical combination. He made no experiments on growing plants to decide what that form was, but contented himself with the conjecture that vegetable and animal matter in the soil and ammoniacal exhalations from it supply the nitrogen in plants. This question, first ventilated certainly by de Saussure, and afterwards the subject of protracted discussion, was finally settled fifty years later by the experiments of Boussingault.
In connection with his researches into the importance of the constituents of the ash, de Saussure proposed the question whether roots take up the solutions of salts and other substances exactly in the form in which they offer themselves. He found first of all that very various and even poisonous matters are absorbed by them, and that there is therefore no such power of choice, as Jung had once supposed; on the other hand, it appeared that the solutions do not enter unchanged into the roots, for in his experiments in every case the proportion of water to the salt absorbed was greater than the proportion between them in the solution, and that some salts enter the plant in larger, some in smaller quantities, under circumstances in other respects the same. But at this time, and for a long time after, it was not possible to understand and rightly explain these facts; the theory of diffusions was not yet known, ​ and fifty or sixty years were to elapse before light was thrown on the questions thus raised by de Saussure.
Such were the most important contents of de Saussure's publication in 1804. His later contributions to the knowledge of some important questions in vegetable physiology will be mentioned further on. A comparison of the contents of the 'Recherches chimiques' with what was known of the chemistry of the food of plants before 1780 excites the liveliest astonishment at the enormous advance made in these twenty-four years. The latter years of the 18th century had proved still more fruitful, if possible, as regards the theory of nutrition than the latter years of the 17th; both periods have this in common, that they developed an extraordinary abundance of new points of view in every branch of botanical science. They resemble each other also in the circumstance that they were both followed by a longer period of inactivity; the time from Hales to Ingen-Houss was highly unproductive, and so also were the thirty years that followed the appearance of de Saussure's great work, though it must be admitted that some good work was done during that period in France, while in Germany the new theory was grossly misunderstood by the chief representatives of botany, as we shall see in the following section. It should be mentioned however that one of these misconceptions, which was not removed till after 1860, was caused by de Saussure himself. He had observed that the red leaves of a variety of the garden Orache disengage oxygen from carbon dioxide, as much as the green leaves of the common kind. In this case he was hasty, and concluded from this single observation that the green colour is not an essential character of the parts which decompose carbonic acid; if he had only removed the epidermis of the red leaves he would have found that the inner tissue is coloured as dark green as the ordinary green leaves. He who was usually so extremely careful as an observer was for once negligent, and later writers, as is apt to happen, fixed exactly on this one weak point, and repeatedly ​ called in question one of the most weighty facts of vegetable physiology, namely, that only cells which contain chlorophyll eliminate oxygen.
5. Vital force. Respiration and heat of plants. Endosmose. 1804-1840.
During the twenty years that followed the appearance of de Saussure's chemical researches the theory of the nutrition of plants can scarcely be said to have been advanced in any one direction, while much that had already been accomplished was not even understood. Various circumstances worked together to introduce misconceptions in this province of botany ; above all others the inclination, more strongly pronounced than ever at this period, to attribute to organisms a special vital principle or force, which was supposed to possess a variety of wonderful powers, so that it could even produce elementary substances, heat, and other things out of nothing. Whenever any process in such organisms was difficult to explain by physical or chemical laws, the vital force was simply called in to bring about the phenomena in question in some inexplicable manner. It was not that the question was now raised, which at a later time engaged the attention of profounder thinkers, whether there was a special agent operating in organic bodies beside the general forces which govern inorganic nature ; for a careful examination of this question would certainly have led to the most earnest efforts to explain all the phenomena of life by- physical or chemical laws. On the contrary, it was found convenient to assume this vital force as proved, and to assign it as the cause of a variety of phenomena, thus escaping the necessity of explaining the way in which the effects were produced; in a word, the assumption of a vital force was not a hypothesis to stimulate investigation, but a phantom that made all intellectual efforts superfluous.
Another hindrance to the progress of physiology, especially ​ where questions of nutrition turned on the movement of the sap, was the backward condition of the study of the inner structure of plants, as described in the second book. For instance, the question of the descending sap was complicated in the strangest way by Du Petit-Thouars's theory of bud-roots that descend between the bark and the wood; Reichel's unfounded idea of the rising of the sap in the tubes of the wood was generally accepted, and a still worse error was maintained by some, that the intercellular spaces of the parenchyma are true sap-conveying organs. In 1812 Moldenhawer had to in- sist, but without producing any general conviction, that the vessels of the wood contain air, and Treviranus in 1821 that the stomata serve for the entrance and exit of air. We need not notice here what nature-philosophers like Kieser said about nutrition and the movement of the sap; but even those who were far from adopting the extravagancies of this school were incapable of either making use of or carrying on the labours of Ingen-Houss, Senebier, and de Saussure. We may adduce in proof of this statement the remarks of Link on the function of leaves in his 'Grundlehren der Anatomic und Physiologic,' 1807. He says at p. 202 that their function is according to Hales transpiration, according to Bonnet absorption, according to Bjerkander the exudation and secretion of a variety of fluids, according to Hedwig the storing up of juices, and inasmuch as leaves increase the green surfaces of plants, bear stomata and hairs, and hold a quantity of juices in their abundant parenchyma, we may ascribe all these functions, but none of them exclusively, to leaves; the only thing peculiar to them is that they convey elaborated juices to the young parts. Their great work, the decomposition of carbon dioxide, he does not mention. But this neglect of the doctrines of Ingen-Houss, Senebier, and de Saussure was common, especially in Germany: it is seen in the efforts made to prove once more the existence of a descending sap in the rind, just as it had been proved in the two previous centuries, by the result of removing a ring of bark ​ from the stem, and by similar experiments; whereas the simple consideration that it is only in the green leaves that carbonaceous vegetable substance is formed, would have made the existence of what was known as a descending sap appear to be a matter of course, and must have led to a much clearer conception of the matter. But this consideration was either quite overlooked or only mentioned incidentally by those who occupied themselves with experiments on the movement of the descending sap. This is the case in Heinrich Cotta's 'Naturbeobachtungen über die Bewegung und Function des Saftes in den Gewachsen,' 1806, in many respects an instructive work, and in Knight's otherwise serviceable experiments on the growth in thickness of trees. It was not till after 1830 that De Candolle and Dutrochet perceived that the fact that the green leaves are assimilating organs must be decisive of the question of the movement of the sap in the stem.
No progress was made with the general doctrine of nutrition between 1820 and 1840 except in one point, the absorption of oxygen by all parts of plants; here something was done to consolidate the theory and to enrich it with new facts; it was indeed a subject more adapted to the views of the day, because it at once suggested a variety of analogies with the respiration of animals. Grischow showed in 1819 that Fungi never decompose carbon dioxide, but absorb oxygen and give off carbon dioxide. Marcet carried the subject further in 1834, after de Saussure had published in 1822 an excellent investigation into the absorption of oxygen by flowers; in this work we have the basis laid for the theory of vegetable heat, to which we shall return. But Dutrochet was the first who made an elaborate comparison of the respiration of plants and animals (1837), and showed that not only growth, as de Saussure had already perceived, but also the sensitiveness of plants depends on the presence of oxygen, that is on their respiration. The recognition of the fact, that the inhalation of oxygen plays the same part in plants that it does in animals, prepared the way ​ for the view that heat in plants is simply a result of their respiration, as it is in animals. It is not necessary to describe at length the experiments which were made on heat in plants before 1822; they were one and all vitiated by a want of clearness in the statement of the question, which made success impossible; it was assumed that this heat by raising the temperature of the plant would make itself felt by surrounding objects, and it was sought for exactly where it is least to be found, in the wood, in fruits and tubers, and generally in resting, inactive parts. Moreover the previous experiments, collected in Goeppert's book 'Ueber die Warmeentwicklung der Pflanzen,' 1830, were so unskilfully managed that they could not possibly lead to any result. Nor could the question whether plants really develope internal heat, as animals do, be determined by a few cases of active development of heat in flowers, because an idea was prevalent at the time in connection with the theory of a vital force, that flowers as the organs of reproduction alone possessed the power of generating heat.
Lavoisier had clearly perceived in 1777 that the combustion of substances containing carbon by inhaled oxygen was the source of animal heat, and had proved it by experiments. Senebier, who first observed the rise of temperature in the inflorescence of Arum by the thermometer, had at least suggested in his work on physiology of 1800 (iii. p. 315) that a vigorous absorption of oxygen might be the cause of the phenomenon. Bory de St. Vincent reported in 1804 that Hubert, the owner of a plantation in Madagascar, had observed among other things that the air in which the flowering spike of one of the Aroideae had developed its heat could support neither animal respiration nor combustion. These indications were however disregarded, until de Saussure in 1822 proved directly the connection between the absorption of oxygen and the rise of temperature in flowers. It was however a long time before heat in plants was conceived of as a general fact necessarily connected with then respiration. This conception would have swept away the ​ whole mass of facts accumulated by Goeppert in his book of 1830, from which he tried to prove (p. 228) that plants at no period of their life possess the power of generating heat a view which he retracted however in 1832, when he had observed a rise of temperature in germinating plants, bulbs, tubers, and in green plants, when collected into heaps. How difficult it was for physiologists under the dominion of the ' vital force ' to hold firmly to the simple principle of natural heat, and not to be led away by isolated observations, is shown by the expressions of De Candolle in 1835, and still more by those of Treviranus in 1838. It is therefore refreshing to see Meyen in his 'Neues System' (1838), vol. ii, warmly asserting this principle, and making the development of heat in plants a necessary con- sequence of their respiration and of other chemical processes. Meyen himself produced no new observations; but Vrolik and De Vriese showed by laborious experiments in 1836 and 1839 the dependence of the generation of heat in the flowers of Aroideae on the absorption of oxygen. A higher importance as regards the general principle attaches to the attempt of Dutrochet in 1840 to prove that even growing shoots generate small quantities of heat, as shown by a thermo-electric apparatus. Some of the details in these observations are open to objection; but it cannot be denied that they are based on a clear recognition of the general principle, though they ignore the consideration that the generation of heat in plants is not necessarily accompanied with a rise in temperature, since cooling causes may be acting at the same time with greater effect. However the doctrine of the natural heat of plants was in the main established by the observations of de Saussure, Vrolik, De Vriese, and Dutrochet, and by Meyen's and Dutrochet's assertion of the principle laid down by Lavoisier, though thirty years elapsed before it became an accepted truth in vegetable physiology.
The crude idea of a vital force was deprived of one of its chief supports when it was recognised that the natural heat of ​ organisms was a product of chemical processes induced by respiration, for this had been regarded since the time of Aristotle as more peculiarly an effect of the principle of life. And now another discovery was made, equally calculated to promote the reference to mechanical principles of those general and important phenomena of life which had hitherto been indolently ascribed to the operation of the vital force. It appears to be a matter of indifference whether Professor Fischer of Breslau is or is not to be considered as the true discoverer of endosmose in 1822, for it is certain that it was Dutrochetwho first studied the subject with exactness, and above all perceived its extraordinary value for the explanation of certain phenomena in living organisms. He repeatedly called attention to this value in the years between 1826 and 1837, and endeavoured to refer a variety of phenomena in vegetation to this agency. He had first observed the operation of endosmose in its mechanical effects in living bodies; the escape of the zoospores of an aquatic Fungus and the ejection of the sperm from the spermathecae of snails first led him to the hypothesis, that the more concentrated solutions inclosed in organic membranes exercise an attraction on surrounding water, which, forcing its way into the inclosed space, is there able to exert considerable powers of pressure. To Dutrochet ​ must always belong the merit of having brought into notice this mechanical effect of endosmose and of employing it to explain a number of vital phenomena. Many things in which a mechanical explanation had not been hitherto thought of could now be traced to a mechanical principle, the effects of which could be exhibited and more accurately studied by means of artificial apparatus. Dutrochet rightly attached a special value to the fact, that all states of tension in vegetable tissue could be at once explained by endosmose and exosmose, though, as so often happens in such matters, he may have extended his new principle to cases where it was not applicable, as we shall see below. His account of the nature of endosmose itself must now be considered to be obsolete, nor did the mathematician Poisson or the physicist Magnus about 1830 succeed in framing a satisfactory theory on the subject. It was discovered in the course of the succeeding twenty or thirty years, that the phenomena observed by Dutrochet, and which he called endosmose and exosmose, were only complicated cases of hydro-diffusion, which with the diffusion of gas forms an important part of molecular physics. Dutrochet, like his immediate successors, conducted his investigations into osmose with animal and vegetable membranes, the latter being of a complex structure; with these he always observed in addition to the endosmotic flow of water into the more concentrated solution, an escape of the solution itself, and from this he concluded that there must always be two currents in opposite directions through the membrane which separates the two fluids, that, as he expresses it, the endosmose is always accompanied with exosmose. This error, which was even developed later into a theory of the endosmotic equivalent, has had much to do till recently with making it impossible or difficult to refer certain phenomena of vegetation to the processes of hydro-diffusion. To mention only one case, Schleiden rightly observed that if endosmose, as Dutrochet understood it, is the sole cause why water is absorbed by the roots, ​ there must also be a corresponding exosmose at the roots; and this, which was called root-discharge, Macaire Prinsep thought he had actually discovered, and even Liebig firmly believed in its existence till a recent period, although the researches of Wiegman and Polstorff (1842) and later more careful investigations showed, that there was no noticeable discharge by exosmose to answer to the great quantity of water with substances in solution in it which is taken up by the roots. Again, Dutrochet's theory of endosmose did not fully explain the way in which the several substances which feed the plant find their way into and are disseminated in it. But notwithstanding these and other defects it deserved the greatest consideration, because it gave the first impulse to the further development of the theory of diffusion, and contained a mechanical principle which might serve to explain very various phenomena in vegetation as yet unexplained. Dutrochet hastened to apply it to this purpose, where it was at all possible to do so, and chiefly in his treatise on the ascending and descending sap ('Memoires,' 1837, i. p. 365), which was superior to anything which had been written on the movement of the sap in plants in its clear conception of the question and in perspicuity of treatment. It should be especially mentioned that Dutrochet formed a true estimate of the functions of the leaves as regards both the ascending and descending sap, and to some extent pointed out the fault which lies at the bottom of the .earlier experiments with coloured fluids. After communicating a number of good observations on the paths of the ascending and descending sap, and noticing particularly that in the vine the vessels of the wood serve for the movement of the sap only in spring, when vines bleed, but that they are air-passages in summer, when transpiration causes the most copious flow of water in the wood, he proceeds to consider the forces which effect the movement of the ascending sap in the wood both in spring and summer. He first of all judiciously distinguishes two things which had been before always mixed ​ up together, the weeping of severed root-stocks and the rise of the sap in the wood in transpiring plants. The first is caused, he thinks, by impulsion, the other by attraction; we should now say, that in weeping root-stocks the water is pressed upwards, in transpiring plants drawn up. He then refers the phenomenon of impulsion to endosmose in the roots, and without going much into detail as regards the anatomical conditions, he compares a weeping root-stock to his own endosmometer, in the tube of which the fluid that has been sucked in rises by endosmose and even flows over; it is true that no very thorough understanding of the matter was gained in this way, but at any rate the principle which was to explain it was indicated. He then endeavours to explain the movement of the water which ascends in the wood of transpiring plants by the action of endosmose from cell to cell. In this he failed entirely, as was afterwards perceived; but he succeeded in showing that all the mechanical explanations that had been previously attempted were incorrect, and the whole treatise, though unsatisfactory in its main result, contains a great number of ingenious experiments and acute remarks.
With the exception of Théodore de Saussure, who occupied himself exclusively with chemical questions in physiology, Dutrochet was the only vegetable physiologist in the period between 1820 and 1840 who studied all its more important questions thoroughly and experimentally; his treatise on the respiration of plants, which has been already mentioned, is excellent in itself, and was of the greatest importance at the time it appeared, because it brought the chemical processes in respiration, the entrance and exit of the gases, for the first time into correct connection with the air-passages in the plant, with the stomata, the vessels, and the intercellular spaces, and submitted the composition of the air contained in the cavities of plants to careful examination. It was the best work on the respiration of plants in the year 1837 and for a long time after; and if Dutrochet made the mistake of regarding the oxygen ​ which is disengaged from the plant itself in the light as the chief agent in respiration, and the oxygen directly absorbed from the atmosphere as only subsidiary to this, he compensated for it by recognising the importance of the fact, that only cells which contain chlorophyll decompose carbon dioxide, and still more by correctly distinguishing between respiration by the absorption of oxygen and the decomposition of carbonic dioxide in light; these two processes were at that time and afterwards very inappropriately distinguished as the diurnal and nocturnal respiration of plants, and this misleading expression maintained itself in spite of Garreau's protest in 1851 till after 1860, when a modern German physiologist succeeded in establishing the true distinction between respiration and assimilation in plants. Another mischievous complication arose about 1830 connected with the expression, circulation of the sap; it was thought that an argument for such a circulation even in the higher plants was to be found in the 'circulation of the sap' (protoplasm) in the cells of the Characeae, which had been detected by Corti and more exactly described by Amici; Dutrochet (Mémoires, I. p. 431) exposed this confusion of ideas, and has the merit of refuting at the same time the absurd theory of the 'circulation of the vital sap,' for which Schultz-Schultzenstein had received a prize from the Academy of Paris.
We shall recur in the next chapter to Dutrochet's minute investigations into the movements connected with irritability in plants, which he also endeavoured to refer to endosmotic changes in the turgidity of the tissues, but he did not do justice to the anatomical conditions of the problem. And here we may take occasion to remark, that Dutrochet's works were often undervalued, especially in Germany, greatly to the detriment of vegetable physiology. His younger German contemporaries, von Mohl and Schleiden, and at a later time Hofmeister, were right in pointing out what was erroneous and sometimes arbitrary in his mechanical explanations of ​ various movements in plants, and it cannot be denied that he was sometimes led into obscure and doubtful views, as for instance when without any apparent connection he regarded the inhalation of oxygen as a mechanical condition of the rising of the sap and also of heliotropic curvatures, and that his attempts at explanation were not seldom forced and improbable; but all this does not prevent it from being true, that an attentive reader will still gain much instruction from his physiological writings and be excited by them to examine for himself. Dutrochet was a decidedly able man and an independent thinker, who it is true was often led astray by his prejudices, but at the same time manfully protested against the old traditional way of dealing with physiological ideas, and substituted careful examination both of his own and others' investigations for the accumulation and comfortable retailing of isolated observations which was then the fashion. After de Saussure's 'Recherches chimiques' Dutrochet's 'Memoires pour servir a l'histoire anatomique et physiologique des vegetaux et des animaux,' 1837, are without doubt the best production, which physiological literature has to show in the long period from 1804 to 1840. If later botanists, instead of dwelling on his faults, had developed with care and judgment all that was really good in his general view of vegetable physiology, this branch of botanical science would not have declined as it did in the interval between 1840 and 1860. We shall discover the greatness of Dutrochet as a vegetable physiologist by comparing his work above-mentioned with the best text-books of the subject of the same time, those of De Candolle, Treviranus, and Meyen; not one of them comes up to Dutrochet's Memoires in acuteness or depth.
The three text-books just mentioned contained little or nothing new either in facts or ideas on the subject of the nutrition of plants; all three were rather compilations of what was already known, and differed from each other only in their selection of material and in the form which each sought to give ​ to the general theory; but this is a reason why we should take a nearer look at them, that we may learn how the spirit and tendencies of the time were reflected in vegetable physiology, and made themselves felt particularly in the theory of nutrition. De Candolle's work appeared in French in 1832 in two volumes, the first only being devoted to the subject of the nutrition of plants, and in German in 1833 with many valuable annotations by the translator Roeper, under the title, 'Pflanzen-physiologie oder Darstellung der Lebenskrafte und Lebensverrichtungen der Gewachse.' It suffers, in common with the other two books we have mentioned on the same subject, and with the earlier works of Du Hamel, Mustel, and other writers, from a too discursive mode of treatment, which has the effect of burying the points of fundamental importance under a huge mass of facts and statements from other writers. It contains much that might have been omitted as obsolete, and much empirical material of a purely chemical nature, which could not at that time be applied to the purposes of physiology. Nevertheless, it deserved the great consideration which it enjoyed for a long time, especially in Germany, for its author had undertaken to treat vegetable physiology as a separate and peculiar branch of knowledge, not ignoring at the same time its connection with and dependence on physics, chemistry, phytotomy, and biology proper, and thus to give a full and complete delineation of vegetable life ; whereas the best works that had been written since Du Hamel's time, especially on the nutrition of plants, had proceeded from chemists and physicists or from plant-growers like Knight and Cotta, who treated the subject in a one-sided manner, each from his own point of view, and made no attempt to give a connected account of all the phenomena of vegetation. For this reason De Candolle's 'Physiologie végétale' is the most important performance that appeared after Du Hamel's 'Physique des Arbres'; and if we wish to know what progress was made in vegetable physiology gener​ rally, and in the doctrine of nutrition particularly, in the period from 1758 to 1832, we have only to compare the contents of these two books. That this progress was a considerable one, appears plainly from a short summary at the end of the first volume of the general theory of nutrition, as De Candolle himself conceived it; this summary will show us at the same time that he aimed rather at giving a clear account of the whole of the internal economy of the plant, than at searching into the moving forces, the causes and effects. From this he was necessarily withheld by his assumption of a vital force. He distinguished four kinds of forces; the force of attraction which produces the physical, and that of elective affinity which causes the chemical phenomena; then the vital force, the original source of all physiological, and the soul-force, the cause of all psychical phenomena. Only the first three of these forces operate in the plant, and though it is necessary to find out what phenomena in vegetation are due to physical or chemical causes, yet the main task of the vegetable physiologist is to discern those which proceed from the vital force, and the chief mark of such phenomena is that they cease with the death of the plant (p. 6). Of course therefore all the peculiar phenomena of nutrition, which are manifested only in the living plant, come within the domain of the vital force. It must be allowed, however, that De Candolle has made a very moderate use of the vital force, and confines himself wherever he can to physical and chemical explanations; and when he has recourse to the vital force, it is owing less to the influence of his philosophical point of view than to the fact that his account is based rather on tradition and information at second hand than on actual research. It is true that De Candolle was perhaps better acquainted than any contemporary botanist with the physics and chemistry of his day, and it is part of his great merit that he should have acquired so much knowledge on these subjects while engrossed in his splendid labours as a systematist and morphologist; but he betrays, at least in his later years, a want of practice in the study ​ of physics and a want also of the habit of mind which this imparts, and which is more important to the physiologist than a knowledge merely of many facts. But this defect is still more apparent in Treviranus and Meyen, whose works on physiology were published soon after that of the great systematise
De Candolle first brings together all the facts in physiology which have been discovered from the beginning, not omitting the chemical researches of more modern times into the substance of plants, and then gives a general delineation of the processes of nutrition in the plant : ' The spongioles (an unfortunate invention of his own which has not yet disappeared from French books, and plays a great part in Liebig's latest work) the spongioles of the roots, being actively contractile and aided by the capillarity and hygroscopic qualities of their tissue, suck in the water that surrounds them together with the saline organic or gaseous substances with which it is laden. By the operation of an activity which is manifested principally in the contractility of the cells and perhaps also of the vessels, and is maintained by the hygroscopic character and capillarity of the tissue of the plant and also by the interspaces produced by exspiration of the air and by other causes, the water sucked in by the roots is conducted through the wood and especially in the intercellular passages to the leaf-like parts, being attracted in a vertical direction by the leaves and in a lateral direction by the cellular envelope (cortical parenchyma) at every period of the year, but chiefly in the spring; a considerable part of it is exhaled all day long through the stomata into the outer air in the form of pure water, leaving in the organs in which the evaporation takes place all the saline, and especially all the mineral particles which it contained. The crude sap which reaches the leaf-like parts of the plant there encounters the sun-light, and by it the carbonic acid gas held in solution by the sap, whether derived from the water sucked in by the roots or from the atmospheric air, or being part of that which the oxygen of the air produced with the surplus carbon of the plant ​ is decomposed in the day-time; the carbon is fixed in the plant and the oxygen discharged as gas into the air. The immediate result of this operation appears to be the formation of a substance which in its simplest and most ordinary state is a kind of gum consisting of one atom of water and one of carbon, and which may be changed with very little alteration into starch, sugar, and lignine, the composition of which is almost the same. The nutrient sap thus produced descends during the night from the leaves to the roots, by way of the rind and the alburnum in Exogens, by way of the wood in Endogens. On its way it falls in with glands or glandular cells, especially in the rind and near the place where it was first formed; these fill themselves with the sap and generate special substances in their interior, most of which are of no use in the nutrition of the plant, but are destined either to be discharged into the outer air or to be conducted to other parts of the tissue. The sap deposits in its course the food-material, which becoming more or less mixed up with the ascending crude sap in the wood, or sucked in with the water which the parenchyma of the rind draws to itself through the medullary rays, is absorbed by the cells and chiefly by the roundish or only slightly elongated cells, and is there further elaborated. This storing up of food-material, which consists chiefly of gum, starch, sugar, perhaps also lignine, and sometimes fatty oil, takes place copiously in organs appointed for the purpose, from which this material is again removed to serve for the nourishment of other organs. The water, which rises from the roots to the leaf-like parts of the plant, reaches them in an almost pure state, if it passes quickly through the woody parts, the molecules of which are but slightly soluble. If, on the other hand, the water flows through parts in which there is much roundish cell-tissue filled with food-material, it moves more slowly and mixes with this material and dissolves it; when it is drawn away from these places by the vital activity of the growing parts, it reaches them not as pure water but charged with nutrient substances. The juices of plants appear ​ to be conveyed chiefly through the intercellular passages. The vessels probably share in certain cases in these functions, but serve generally as air-canals. The cells appear to be the really active organs in nutrition, since decomposition and assimilation of the juices take place in them. Cyclosis ( of Schultze's vital sap) is a phenomenon which appears to be closely connected only with the preparation of the milky juices, and to be caused by the actively contractile nature of the cell-walls or of the tubes. Woody and other substances are deposited in every cell in different quantities according to their kinds and the accompanying circumstances, and clothe their walls; the unequal thickness of the layer so deposited appears according to Hugo von Mohl to have given rise to the supposition of perforated cells; that is, the parts of the cell-wall that remain transparent appear under the microscope as pores. Every cell may be regarded as a body which prepares juices in its interior; but in vascular plants their activity stands in such a connection with a complex of organs, that a single cell does not represent the whole organism, as may be said of the cells of certain cellular plants, which are all like one another. There is no circulation in plants like the circulation in animals, but there is an alternating ascent and descent of the crude sap and of the formative sap which is often mixed with it. Both these phenomena depend perhaps on the contractile power in cells that are still young, and if so, this power would be the true vital energy in plants.’
What is strange to us in De Candolle's theory of nutrition is due chiefly to the predominance of the vital force; yet at the same time it gives the facts in their general connection, and its best feature is, that the true function of the leaves, the decomposition of carbon dioxide in light and the production of organisable substance, is made the central point of the whole circle of the processes of nutrition. Very different in this respect were the views of the two most eminent German ​ vegetable physiologists at the close of the period before us, Treviranus and Meyen, though they are not in accord with one another in their general conception of the subject. It may be said that all the prejudices and errors, built up on the foundation of the hypothesis of a vital force during the first thirty years of the 19th century, culminated in Treviranus; while others were already setting up the mechanical explanation of the phenomena of vegetation as the one object to be attained, Treviranus produced once more the whole machinery of the obsolete doctrine of the vital force, and with such effect, that his 'Physiologic der Gewachse' was already obsolete when it appeared in 1835. The second volume of Meyen's 'Neues System der Pflanzenphysiologie' was a striking contrast to the work of Treviranus; Meyen endeavours as far as possible to trace back the phenomena of vegetation to mechanical and chemical causes, though he does not often succeed in bringing anything to light that is new or of lasting service. He, like Treviranus, was deficient in sound training in chemistry and physics; they did not stand in this respect, as Hales and Malpighi once did, at the highest point of knowledge of their time. At the same time there was a great difference in the way in which each dealt with the writings of his predecessors; Treviranus, who had done good service in former years in phytotomy, was not equal to the task which he had now undertaken; his physiological expositions are marked by feebleness of thought and by an inability to survey as from a higher ground the connection between the facts; he distrusts all that had been done during the previous thirty years, and almost everywhere appeals to the publications of the 18th century; he lives indeed in the ideas of the past, without gaining vigour from the forcible reasoning and freshness of thought of a Malpighi, a Mariotte, or a Hales. Meyen's treatment of his subject is on the contrary fresh and vigorous; he does not disregard the old, but he holds chiefly to the modern conquests of science; while Treviranus with singular ​ ill-luck constantly overlooks what is valuable in itself and important in its results, Meyen generally picks out the best things from the books before him; Treviranus timidly avoids expressing any view decidedly and maintaining it; Meyen, amid the multiplicity of the labours which we have already described, finds no time to arrange his thoughts, is hasty in judgment and often contradicts himself. But with all these defects, he is still the champion of the new tendencies that were being developed, while Treviranus lives entirely in the past, and shows no trace of the actively creative spirit which was soon to burst forth so mightily in every branch of natural science.
If we examine what both these writers have said on the subject of the nutrition of plants, we shall find that the difference in their general views in physiology as described above appears at once in their treatment of the work of suction in the roots, and of the means by which the sap ascends; here in Treviranus the vital force is everything; it makes the vessels of the wood conduct the juices from the roots into the leaves, with other antiquated notions of the kind; Meyen on the contrary adopts Dutrochet's position, and even rejects De Candolle's spongioles. Treviranus knows not what to make of respiration; Meyen explains it without hesitation as a function that answers to respiration in animals, and finds in it the main cause of the natural heat which Treviranus derives in the old mystical fashion from the vital force. In one point however they agree, namely, in a complete misconception of the connection between the decomposition of carbon dioxide in the leaves and the general nutrition of the plant. It is necessary to the understanding of the confusion of ideas which had crept at this time into the doctrine of nutrition, and to a right estimate of the services of Liebig and Boussingault on this point, that we should look a little more closely into the chemical part of the theory of nutrition in Treviranus and Meyen.
Treviranus in the introduction to his book repudiated the idea of a vital force separable from matter, but he was in fact ​
​ There is much in the details of Meyen's views on the chemical processes in the nutrition of plants that is better than what we find in Treviranus; it is a great point that he concluded from earlier experiments, that the salts which find their way with the water into the roots are not merely 'stimulants' but food-material, and, as was before said, he explained the respiration of oxygen by plants correctly in accordance with de Saussure's observation. But he too stumbled over the assimilation of carbon; he, like so many before and after him, was confused by the simple fact, that gaseous matter takes part both in the nutrition and the respiration of the plant; and taking the processes in both cases for processes of respiration, he considered the absorption of oxygen to be the only important and intelligible function, and the decomposition of carbon dioxide in light to be a matter of indifference as regards the internal economy of the plant. Instead of ascertaining by a simple calculation, whether the apparently small quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was perhaps sufficient to supply vegetation with carbon, he simply declared it to be insufficient, and because plants will not flourish in barren soil merely by being supplied with water containing carbon dioxide, he gave up the importance of that gas altogether. He too found the humus-theory, which had been constructed by the chemists, more convenient for his purpose, and like Treviranus derived the whole of the carbon in plants from 'extract' of the soil, without any close attention to the facts of the case; he refused to believe that the soil is rendered not poorer but richer in humus by the plants that grow on it. It is obvious then that the account given by Treviranus and Meyen of the chemical processes that take place in the nutrition of plants, though correct in some of the details, could afford no true general view of the processes of nutrition, because it entirely misconceived the cardinal points in the whole theory, namely the source of the carbon, and the co-operation of light and of the atmosphere; and ​ thus the best results of the observations of Ingen-Houss, Senebier, and de Saussure were lost upon the German vegetable physiologists.
6. Settlement of the question of the food-material of plants. 1840-1860.
We have noticed in the previous section the rise of views during the period between 1830 and 1840 which were calculated to make the hypothesis of a vital force appear superfluous, at least as an explanation of certain important phenomena in vegetation ; such were the referring the natural heat of plants to chemical processes, and the movement of the sap to osmose; in the domain of chemistry also, in which Berzelius had in the year 1827 made the distinction between organic and inorganic matter to consist in the fact, that the former is produced under the influence of the vital force, the opinion was openly expressed that such an intrusion of the vital principle could not be allowed, since organic compounds had been repeatedly produced from inorganic substances by artificial means, and therefore without its aid. The general tendency of scientific thought was now in fact unfavourable to the nature-philosophy of former days; it inclined to free itself from the obscurity that attended the idea of a vital force, and to assert the belief, that chemical and physical laws prevail alike outside and inside all organisms; this idea became an axiom with the more eminent representatives of natural science after 1840, and if not always expressed in words, was made the basis of all their attempts to explain physiological phenomena.
Thus a freer course began to open for the intellectual movement of the time even before the year 1840, and strict inductive research, and above all the establishment of facts and closer reasoning were now demanded in the question of the nutrition of plants, as they were also in the domain of morphology and phytotomy. But in dealing with the theory ​ of nutrition, the first thing required was not the discovery of new facts so much as the forming a correct appreciation of the discoveries of Ingen-Houss, Senebier, and de Saussure, and clearing away the misconceptions that had gathered round them. The chief modern representatives of vegetable physiology, De Candolle, Treviranus, and Meyen, had increased the difficulty of the task by neglecting to keep the several questions of their science, the chemical especially and the mechanical, sufficiently distinct from one another. The question, what are the materials which as a rule compose the food of plants, though one of the first and most immediate importance, had been very imperfectly investigated, while attention had been diverted to a confused mass of comparatively unimportant matters, and the solution of that question had been rendered impossible for the time by the humus-theory, an invention of chemists and agriculturists, which Treviranus and others had fitted so readily into the doctrine of a vital force. To Liebig belongs the merit of removing these difficulties and all the superfluous matter which had gradually gathered round the subject, and of setting forth distinctly the points which had to be considered; this was all that was required to ensure a satisfactory solution of the problem, for former observations had supplied an abundance of empirical material. But some points of minuter detail were brought out in the course of his investigations which required new and comprehensive experiments, and for these a most capable and successful observer was found between 1840 and 1850 in the person of Boussingault.
But before we go on to give a fuller account of the work of Liebig and Boussingault, we may mention a circumstance which serves to indicate the character of the revolution in scientific opinion before and after 1840. An anonymous 'Friend of science' had put a prize at the disposal of the Academy of Gottingen for an answer to the questions, 'whether the inorganic elements, which are found in the ashes of plants. are found in the plants themselves, in cases where they are not ​ supplied to them from without; and whether these elements are such essential constituents of the vegetable organism, as to be required for its full development.' The first question appears in the present day absurd, since it implies the possibility of elementary matter coming into being, and of certain special elements coming into being in the plants themselves, an idea however not unfamiliar to the nature-philosophy and the vital force school. It was easy for Wiegman and Polstorff, the authors of the essay that gained the prize (1842), men of the new school, to answer the first question in the negative, and indeed their answer to the second question involved a negative answer to the first. The investigations made by Wiegman and Polstorff in connection with the subject of the second question were conducted in a thoroughly intelligent manner, though they set out from the hypothesis that a certain quantity of compounds of humic acid, as it was called, must be present in the food-mixtures. Their experiments, better adapted to the purpose than any previous ones, showed convincingly that it is necessary to the normal nutrition of the plant that it should take up the constituents of the ash; the observers also took into consideration a number of other questions connected with nutrition, in which however we may already see the influence of Liebig's book which had come out during their investigations.
This work was the one entitled 'Die organische chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agricultur und Physiologic,' which appeared first in 1840 and was afterwards repeatedly reprinted and enlarged. The name of the author, the first chemist of Germany, raised an expectation that the questions respecting nutrition would be dealt with otherwise than they had hitherto been, and this expectation was more than fulfilled by the novelty and boldness with which Liebig cleared up the most important points of the theory, seized upon all that was essential and fundamental, and disregarded the unimportant matter which had before only served to confuse the question. ​ Moreover, he was able to rest on long-accepted facts in just those points which were the most important, and on these he had only to throw the light of his chemical knowledge to dispel the previous darkness. In accordance with his main purpose, which was to apply organic chemistry and vegetable physiology to the service of agriculture, Liebig directed the severity of his criticism first of all against the humus-theory constructed by chemists and agriculturists and thoughtlessly adopted by various physiologists ; this was the first thing that must be got rid of, if the question was to be answered, of what substances does the food of plants consist, for the humus-theory was at once incorrect, and the product of a want of reflection which overlooked facts which lay before men's eyes. Liebig showed that what was known as humus is not diminished but constantly increased by vegetation, that the quantity in existence would not suffice for any length of time for the support of a vigorous vegetation, and that it is not taken up by plants. This once established, and Liebig's calculations left no doubt on the point, there remained one source only for the carbon of the plant, namely, the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere, with regard to which it was shown by a very simple calculation resting on eudiometric results that its quantity is sufficient to supply the vegetation of the whole earth for countless generations. It is true that Liebig in his zeal went much too far, when he found something contradictory in the true respiration of plants, because it is connected with the elimination of carbon dioxide, and simply denied its reality. On the other hand the theoretical significance of the fact established by de Saussure, that the elements of water are assimilated at the same time as the carbon, was now for the first time clearly explained. Liebig was better able to realise the importance of this fact for the theory of nutrition than de Saussure had been. But these weighty points were not the ones which attracted most attention with the adherents and opponents of Liebig; the practical tendency of his book made ​ the discussion, to which it gave rise especially among chemists and agriculturists, turn rather on the question of the source of the nitrogen in the substance of plants. The humus-theory had made the nitrogen like the carbon enter the plant in the form of organic compounds. De Saussure in his great work of 1804 had named ammonia as a compound of nitrogen which might be taken into consideration with others, but he arrived at no definite conclusion. Liebig, from different points of view and in reliance on his own investigations into the nature of nitrogen and its compounds, arrived at the result, that ammonia must ultimately be the sole source of the nitrogen in the plant, and that the ammonia in the atmosphere and in the soil is quite sufficient to supply vegetation with the requisite amount of nitrogen just as the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere is the sole source of the carbon of the plant; and so he concluded that 'carbon dioxide, ammonia, and water contain in their elements the requisites for the production of all the substances that are in animals and plants during their life-time. Carbon dioxide, ammonia, and water are the ultimate products of the chemical process of their putrefaction and decay.'
Liebig was less happy, at least as regards his mode of treating the subject, in his remarks on the necessity and specific importance of the constituents of the ash to the nutrition of plants. Instead of insisting on an experimental answer to the question, what constituents of the ash are absolutely indispensable to the health of one or all plants, he lost himself in ingenious chemical theories, intended to show the operation of inorganic bases in fixing vegetable acids, the extent to which different bases can replace each other, and similar matters.
It is not requisite for our purpose to follow Liebig in his applications of his theoretical remarks to agriculture, still less to occupy ourselves with the sensation and the discussions which his work excited among practical and theoretical farmers and agricultural chemists. The scientific value of Liebig's considerations on the nutrition of plants stood out in ​ a purer and more definite form for the vegetable physiologists, who turned their attention chiefly to the points mentioned above. It is true that Liebig's work encountered lively opposition from these men also, and the two foremost representatives of vegetable physiology at that time, Schleiden and von Mohl, criticised it unsparingly; this was due partly to the deductive method adopted by Liebig, to which botanists were unaccustomed in physiological questions, and partly to the derogatory expressions in which he indulged against the vegetable physiologists, whom he held responsible with the botanists generally for all the absurdities connected with the humus-theory. Von Mohl asked, and justly, whether de Saussure, Davy, Carl Sprengel, Berzelius and Mulder, the real founders of the theory, were botanists. But it was unnecessary for von Mohl, Schleiden and others to feel touched by Liebig's reproach, at least so far as it was addressed to professed physiologists, for they were no more physiologists than Davy, Berzelius or Mulder. Professed vegetable physioligists, official public representatives of vegetable physiology there were none, and then as now every one who occupied himself occasionally with questions of the kind was called a vegetable physiologist. In this way the contest became a dispute about words, and Liebig, von Mohl and Schleiden lost an excellent opportunity for influencing public opinion in favour of the idea, that it was high time to establish public official representatives of so important a branch of science, who should devote themselves entirely to it; how could it be expected that Professors of botany, who were required by the government and the public to work for the advancement of systematic botany, phytotomy, and medical botany, to give instruction in these subjects, and to devote a large portion of their time to the management of botanic gardens, should do much to promote the study of vegetable physiology, which demands very considerable acquaintance also with physics and chemistry? and where were the laboratories and the instruments for the serious ​prosecution of this branch of science? But these questions were not raised, and the old state of things remained for the time unchanged.
As regards the scientific questions at issue between Liebig and von Mohl, Schleiden, and various agricultural chemists, the contest was chiefly about matters of secondary importance, and among these might be included the objection that Liebig knew scarcely anything of the anatomy of the plant. The main point was, that he had corrected mistaken views as to the way in which plants are fed, had refuted gross errors, had shown what was fundamental and essential and what was unimportant. Everything that was written on the subject after 1840 shows that he did all this completely; the publications called forth by the controversy on his book occupied in the main the ground which Liebig had cleared. Now every body knew all at once what was meant by the decompositon of carbon dioxide in the green parts of plants, that the constituents of the ash are not mere seasoning to the vegetation, and the like; firm ground had been won for all, a number of scientific truths had become common property for ever; this did not of course make it less meritorious in others, to test the rest of Liebig's theories, or even to correct his great mistake about the respiration of plants, as was done emphatically by von Mohl.
It would not be consistent with the design of this work to go into all the details of the discussion excited by the appearance of Liebig's book, into questions for instance respecting the first products of assimilation in plants, and their further transformations by metabolism. Whether the primary use of the basic mineral constituents is merely to fix the vegetable acids, whether these acids are the first products of assimilation, or whether carbo-hydrates are the immediate result of that process, and similar questions, were for some time only matter of conjecture, deduction and combination, unsupported by certain observation obtained by suitable methods; it was not till after ​ 1860 that new paths were struck out on these subjects, and important results achieved. More important at the time for the advance of the science was the further examination of the question respecting the source of the nitrogen which plants assimilate; it was the more necessary that this point should be finally settled, because Liebig's deductions still gave room for many doubts, and the first of vegetable physiologists, de Saussure, in his later days made the mistake of coming forward in opposition to Liebig as a defender of the humus-theory, maintaining (1842) that ammonia or the nitrates are not themselves the food-material of plants, but only serve to dissolve the humus. Others also found it difficult to give up entirely the old and favourite doctrine of the humus; though von Mohl and others acknowledged that the carbon of plants is mainly derived from the atmosphere, yet they thought themselves obliged to assign to the humus, on account of the nitrogen which it contains, a very important share in promoting vegetation. Under these circumstances it was extremely fortunate for physiology that {{sc|Boussingault} took up the question. He had occupied himself before the appearance of Liebig's book with experimental and analytical investigations into germination and vegetation, and specially into the source of nitrogen in plants. His experiments in vegetation in 1837 and 1838 produced no very decisive results; but he continued them for some time longer, improving his methods of observation from year to year; and between the years 1851 and 1855 he succeeded in establishing with all certainty as the result of many repeated trials, that plants are not capable of assimilating the free nitrogen of the atmosphere, but that a normal and vigorous vegetation is produced, when they are supplied with nitrogen from the nitrates in the soil. It appeared also that plants will flourish in a soil from which all trace of organic substance has been removed by heat, if a nitrate is added to the constituents of the ash; this proves at the same time that the whole of the carbon in such plants is derived from the ​ carbon dioxide of the atmosphere without the co-operation of the humus, and that consequently the favourable effect of a soil rich in humus on vegetation must be due to other causes than those which were assumed by the humus-theory. We cannot describe the further services rendered by Boussingault to the theory of nutrition, for this would take us too much into technical details, and the best and most important of his results were first given to the world after 1860, and do not fall therefore within the limits of this history. But it should be mentioned that Boussingault must be considered the founder of modern methods of conducting experiments in vegetation. Liebig had before spoken in terms of sufficient severity of the miserable way in which experiments on the subject of the nutrition of plants were managed after de Saussure's time till later than 1830, but he did not himself introduce better methods; this was reserved for Boussingault. One instance may be given; those who desired to decide the question of the humus by experiment, such as Hartig in conjunction with Liebig and others, generally adopted the plan of supplying plants with compounds of humus-acid, and seeing what would be the result. Boussingault did as Columbus with the egg; he simply made plants supply themselves with food in a soil artificially deprived of all trace of humus and containing a mixture of food-material, in order to prove beyond question that they do not need humus.
In Germany also Prince Salm-Horstmar made similar experiments to those of Boussingault; he occupied himself chiefly in determining the relative importance of the acids and bases of the ash in the nutrition of plants, whether any and which of them are indispensable; these are questions which approached their solution only after 1860, and some are not yet decided.
The establishment of the facts, that plants containing chlorophyll derive the whole of their carbon from the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere, and that the latter is also the original source of the carbon in plants and animals which do not contain ​ chlorophyll; further that the nitrogen which plants assimilate is derived from ammoniacal salts or nitrates, and that the alkalies, alkaline earths in the form of sulphates and phosphates, are indispensable ingredients in the food of plants, must be considered to be the great results of the labour bestowed on the theory of nutrition in the period from 1840 to 1860, while the way was also prepared for many points, which were afterwards of the first importance in the enquiry.
On the other hand the advance made in the theory of the movement of the sap from the time of Dutrochet till nearly 1860 was so small as to be scarcely worth mentioning ; yet it was an advance, that the physiological value of the doctrine of endosmose was more and more highly estimated, and that more solid proofs of the theory itself and a more exact acquaintance with osmotic processes were making it possible to explain more of the details of the movement of material in the plant, though the whole question was far from being finally settled. One discovery must be specially mentioned, the establishment by Hofmeister in 1857 of the fact, that the phenomenon observed for centuries in the grape-vine and other trees, and more recently in Agave and in many tropical climbing plants, known by the name of bleeding or weeping and supposed to be confined to certain periods of vegetation, not only occurs in all plants with true woody cells, but may be produced in them at all times by suitable means. The knowledge of this fact was an aid to the investigation of the cause of the weeping.
The theory of the descending sap was in the least advanced condition during this period; appeal was still made to experiments of the kind which Malpighi, Du Hamel, and Cotta had made, and which in reality show nothing more than that in dicotyledonous woody plants a food elaborated in the leaves is carried downwards through the cortex. As soon as it was understood, that all organic substance originates in the leaves, a fact which no one could doubt after 1840, no experiment was required to prove that the formative matter necessary for ​
* ↑ See the Fragments of Aristotelian phytology in Meyer's 'Geschichte der Botanik,' i. p. 120.
* ↑ J. B. van Helmont was born at Brussels in 1577, and died at Villvorde near Brussels in 1644. He was a leading representative of the chemistry of his day. Kopp, in his 'Geschichte der Chemie,' 1843, i. p. 117, has given a full account of his life and labours.
* ↑ J. D. Major, who was born at Breslan in 1639, ar >d died at Stockholm in 1693, is quoted by Christian Wolff, as well as by Reichel ('De vasis plantarum.' 1758, p. 4) and others, as the founder of the theory of circulation, which he propounded in 1665 in his 'Dissertatio Botanica de planta monstrosa Gottorpiensi,' etc. Kurt Sprengel ('Geschichte der Botanik, ii. p. 7) classes him also among the defenders of the doctrine of palingenesia, a superstitious belief in the reproduction of plants and animals from their ashes, which was used to prove the resurrection of the dead.
* ↑ He says, ' in mediis vasculis reticularibus,' which when taken in connection with his general histology, must be understood to mean the bast-bundles.
* ↑ The date of the birth of Edme Mariotte is not known. He was a native of Burgundy, and lived in Dijon at the time of his earliest scientific labours. He was an ecclesiastic and became Prior of St. Martin sous Beaune near Dijon; he was a Member of the Academy of Sciences in Paris from its foundation in 1666, and was one of the first Frenchmen who experimented in physics and applied mathematics to them. He died in Paris in 1684 ('Biographie Universelle').
* ↑ See the Fragments of Aristotelian phytology in Meyer's 'Geschichte der Botanik,' i. pp. 119, 125.
* ↑ His views are known to me only from Magnol's paper in the 'Histoire de l'Academic Royale des Sciences,' 1709, and Sprengel's 'Geschichte der Botanik,' ii. 20. Perrault's treatise is according to Pritzel's ' Thesaurus ' of the date of 1680, but is published in the 'Œuvres divers de Perrault' of 1721.
* ↑ Especially in pages 1165, 1201, 2067, 2119.
* ↑ Stephen Hales was born in the county of Kent in 1677 and was educated at home without showing any special ability. At the age of nineteen he became a member of Christ's College in Cambridge, and there showed his taste for physics, mathematics, chemistry, and natural history. Nevertheless he took orders and held Church preferment in different counties. He became a Member of the Royal Society in 1718, and read before it his 'Statical Essays.' His 'Haemostatics ' appeared in 1733. He made and published other investigations and discoveries of very various kinds before his death in 1761. He was buried in his church at Riddington, which he had rebuilt at his own cost, and the Princess of Wales caused an inscription to his memory to be placed in Westminster Abbey. See his Eloge in 'Histoire de l'Academic Royale des Sciences,' 1762.
* ↑ See Sprengel, 'Geschichte der Botanik,' i. 229, and Reichel's and Bonnet's works mentioned below.
* ↑ Georg Christian Reichel was born in 1727 and died in 1771. He was Professor in the University of Leipsic.
* ↑ Charles Bonnet, born at Geneva in 1720, sprang from a wealthy family, and was intended for the profession of the law, but gave himself up from an early age to scientific pursuits, and especially to zoology. He was afterwards a member of the great council of Geneva, and wrote various treatises on scientific subjects, psychology, and theology. He died on his property at Genthod near Geneva in 1793. See the 'Biographic Universelle' and Carus, 'Geschichte der Zoologie,' p. 526.
* ↑ See p. 35 of the German translation by Arnold, 1762.
* ↑ Henri Louis du Hamel du Monceau was born at Paris in 1700 and died in 1781. He had an estate in the Gatinais, and turned his studies in physics, chemistry, zoology, and botany to account in the composition of a number of treatises on agriculture, the management of woods and forests, naval affairs, and fisheries. He was made Member of the Academy in 1728 on presenting to it an essay on a disease then raging in the saffron-plantations, and caused by the growth of a fungus ('Biographic Universelle').
* ↑ See Kopp, 'Geschichte der Chemie' (1843), i. p. 306, and 'Entwicklung der Chemie in der neuerenzeit' (1873), p. 138.
* ↑ Still less was gained from an observation made by Bonnet, that leaves exposed to sunlight in water containing air show bubbles of gas on their upper surface. Bonnet expressly denied the active participation of the leaves in the phenomenon, since the same thing happens with dead leaves in water containing air.
* ↑ Jan Ingen-Houss, physician to the Emperor of Austria, practised first in Breda, and afterwards in London. He was born at Breda in Holland in 1730, and died near London in 1799.
* ↑ Jean Senebier, horn at Geneva in 1742, was the son of a tradesman, and after 1765 pastor of the Evangelical Church. On his return from a visit to Paris he published his 'Moral Tales,' and at the suggestion of his friend Bonnet competed for a prize offered at Haarlem for an essay on the Art of Observation. He was awarded the second place in this competition. In 1769 he became pastor at Chancy, and in 1773 librarian of Geneva. At this time, among other literary labours, he translated Spallanzani's more important writings; he also studied chemistry under Tingry, and carried out his researches into the influence of light. In 1791 he wrote an article for the 'Encyclopaedie methodique' on vegetable physiology. The revolution in Geneva drove him into the Canton Vaud, and there he composed his 'Physiologie végétale,' in five volumes. He returned to Geneva in 1799 and took part in a new translation of the Bible. He died in that city in 1809 ('Biographie Universelle').
* ↑ Nicolas Theodore de Saussure was born at Geneva in 1767, and died there in 1845. He was the son of the famous explorer of the Alps, and assisted his father in his observations on Mont Blanc and the Col du Géant. In 1797 he wrote his treatise on carbonic acid in its relation to vegetation, a prelude to his 'Recherches chimiques'; the latter work received great attention from the scientific world, and he was made a corresponding member of the French Institute. He was a man of literary tastes, and took part also in public affairs, being repeatedly elected to the Council of Geneva. His preference for a secluded life is said to have been the reason why he never undertook the duties of a professorship. See the supplement to the 'Biographie Universelle' and Poggendorf s 'Biographisch-litterarisches Handworterbuch.'
* ↑ Henri Joachim Dutrochet, born in 1776, was a member of a noble family which belonged to the department of the Indre and lost its property during the revolution; he therefore adopted medicine as a profession, and took his degree at the Faculty of Paris in 1806. He was attached to the armies in Spain as military surgeon in 1808 and 1809; but he retired as soon as possible from practice and devoted himself in great seclusion to his physiological pursuits, living for some years in Tourainc. He was made corresponding member of the Academy in 1819, and communicated his discoveries to that body. Becoming an ordinary member in 1831, he spent the winter months from that time forward in Paris. He died in 1847 after two years' suffering from an injury to the head. Dutrochet was one of the most successful champions, in animal as well as vegetable physiology, of the modern ideas which displaced the old vitalistic school of thought after See the 'Allgemeine Zeitung' for 1847, p. 780.
* ↑ See above on page 513.