The nature and origin of living matter.

  • Bastian, H. Charlton.
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The nature and origin of living matter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    the air by their leaves, or obtaining it through their rootlets. In the latter case they may obtain it from rains which have fallen to the earth impregnated with the carbonic acid of the atmosphere, or else they procure it from that which is liberated by the gradual decomposition of organic particles in the soil. But that the air is the great storehouse whence, either mediately or immediately, plants procure their carbon, is rendered more and more obvious to us by the consideration of such facts as those to which Schleiden refers in his Biography of a Plant when he says :— From forests maintained in good condition we annually obtain about 4,000 lbs. of dry wood per acre, which contains about 1,000 lbs. of carbon. But we do not manure the soil of the forests, and its supply of humus, far from being exhausted, increases considerably from year to year, owing to the breakage by wind and the fall of the leaf. The haymaker of Switzerland and the Tyrol mows his definite amount of grass every year on the Alps, inaccessible to cattle, and gives not back the smallest quantity of organic substance to the soil. Whence comes this hay if not from the atmosphere ? The plant requires carbon and nitrogen, and in the woods and on the wild Alps there is no possibility of its acquiring these matters save from the ammonia and carbonic acid of the atmosphere. As Dumas says :— It is in plants, consequently, that the true laboratory of organic nature resides ; carbon, hydrogen, am- monium, and water are the elements they work upon ; and woody fibre, starch, gums, and sugars, on the one hand, fibrine, albumen, caseum, and gluten, on the other, are the products that present themselves as fundamental in either organic kingdom of nature—products, however, which are formed in plants, and in plants only, and merely transferred by digestion to the bodies of animals^ Such, then, is the mighty round of things, such are the inter- changes ever taking place on the surface of our globe. The inorganic is continually being fashioned into the organic, and this after passing through successive changes, and after having displayed the manifestations of Life, is ever passing again into the inorganic, ever again giving up its fashioning forces. The crude and formless mass of the air gradually organised in vegetables, passes without change into animals, and becomes the instrument of sensation and thought; then vanquished by this effort, and, as it were, broken, it returns as crude matter to the source whence