Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/468

448 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