Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/542

522 a prisoner within that circle of ideas, and he made a much freer use of the vital force than De Candolle; he went even farther than this, and in his want of chemical experience he hit upon the grossly materialistic notion of a vital matter (I. p. 6). This vital matter is a half-fluid substance, which may be obtained from all bodies that were once alive by boiling and by decay; it is formed from other elements, but it is itself the true elementary matter with which alone physiology has to do; it is common to the animal and vegetable kingdom, and is purest when in the form of mucilage, albumen, and gelatine; that animals and plants alike consist of this vital matter explains the circumstance, that plants serve as food for animals and animals as food for plants. He goes on to show that a similar unctuous substance, called by chemists extract of the soil, and considered by many of them to be an important ingredient in the nutrition of plants, is their true and proper food. This extract of the soil was therefore the vital matter which plants take up; it was natural that Treviranus should no longer attribute any importance to the decomposition of carbon dioxide in the leaves, especially as he was unable to understand the chemical connection of all that Ingen-Houss, Senebier, and de Saussure had written. He explained the co-operation of light in the nutrition of plants to be a merely 'formal condition,' and the salts in solution in the water of the soil were in his opinion stimulants for the use of the extremities of the roots, which were thus put into a condition of 'vital turgescence'; and as the functions of the leaves, such as Malpighi and Hales had conjectured, and Ingen-Houss, Senebier, and de Saussure had proved it to be, had no existence for Treviranus, he made the assimilation of the soil-sap take place on its way, as it flowed upwards and downwards through the plant. We see that nothing can be conceived more deplorable than this theory of nutrition ; it would have been bad at the end of the 17th century, it is difficult to believe that it could have been published thirty years after de Saussure's work.