Page:Makers of British botany.djvu/108

 78 familiar fact that the vine-stump absorbed water before it began to extrude it.

He afterwards (pp. 106–7) used a mercury gauge and registered a root-pressure of $32 1/2$ inches or 36 feet $5 1/3$ inches of water which he proceeds to compare with his own determination of the blood-pressure of the horse (8 feet) and of other animals. Perhaps the most interesting of his root-pressure experiments was that (p. 110) in which several manometers were attached to the branches of a bleeding vine and showed a result which convinced him that "the force is not from the root only, but must proceed from some power in the stem and branches," a conclusion which some modern workers have also arrived at. The figure on page 77 is a simplified reproduction of the plate (Fig. 19) in Vegetable Staticks.

Assimilation.

Hales' belief that plants draw part of their food from the air, and again that air is the breath of life, of vegetables as well as of animals (p. 148), are based upon a series of chemical experiments performed by himself. Not being satisfied with what he knew of the relation between "air" (by which he meant gas) and the solid bodies in which he supposed gases to be fixed, he delayed the publication of Vegetable Staticks for some two years, and carried out the series of observations which are mentioned in his title-page as "An attempt to analyse the air, by a great variety of chymio-statical experiments" occupying 162 pages of his book.

The theme of his inquiry he takes (Vegetable Staticks, p. 165) from "the illustrious Sir Isaac Newton," who believed that "Dense bodies by fermentation rarify into several sorts of Air; and this Air by fermentation, and sometimes without it, returns into dense bodies."

Hales' method consisted in heating a variety of substances, e.g. wheat-grains, pease, wood, hog's blood, fallow-deer's horn, oyster-shells, red-lead, gold, etc., and measuring the "air" given off from them. He also tried the effect of acid on iron filings,