Chemical Lecture Notes
(This historic book may have numerous typos and missing te...)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1888 edition. Excerpt: ...plant takes from the soil a certain amount of mineral substance as a definite mixture, and that these substances will be found again in the ash, and that the carbonic acid and ammonia which the plant requires to form its combustible parts are taken up through its leaves and roots from the atmosphere. If wheat, or corn, is grown on a field, year after year, in time the mineral food of the soil will become exhausted and the plants will not thrive, but will be dwarfed and puny and incapable of enduring the weather, or will die of starvation. Now, if the proper amount of mineral nutriment be added to the soil, the plants will grow, and the atmosphere and mechanical nature of the soil will look after the rest. A factory was established to manufacture artificial fertilizers according to Liebig's idea, but after several years of trial it was found that they were a complete failure. Liebig knew that his theory was right, but was unable to explain why it failed in practice. He worked and thought, and thought and worked. After several years he noticed that certain fields which he had treated with his fertilizers, and which had not been bettered by them, began to show slight but marked and increasing signs of fertility. In the mean time, the English farmer, Lawes, working with a chemist named Gilbert, showed that fertilizers would produce effects if added in a soluble form, and further that ammonia and forms of nitrogen were not taken up by the plants from the air alone but that they must be added to the soil. If these conditions were followed, the yield of a field was enormously increased. Liebig had supposed that if his fertilizers were easily soluble in water they would soak through the earth before the plant could assimilate them, and had...
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