Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/91

Rh Again, root-excretions (assuming their existence) cannot be productive of injury, as we are assured by Dr. Gilbert that clover has been grown in the same plot of garden-soil at Rothamsted for eighteen years in succession, while only a few hundred yards off no condition of manuring has hitherto been successful in restoring the clover-yielding capabilities of the land. Reverting, however, to the alleged antipathies of one plant to another, we may make passing mention of the curious circumstance recorded by M. Paul Levi, that the lianas or climbing plants of the forests of Central America have their likes and dislikes, and that they will not attach themselves to particular trees even when brought into juxtaposition with them. It is significent that the trees which are thus slighted by the twiners are just such as are ill-adapted for the support of such plants, being such as have tall, unbranched trunks, with smooth bark and a dense, overhanging, domelike canopy of foliage. It is not only the climbing plants that refuse to grow on such trees, but to a less extent, also, the mosses, ferns, orchids, Bromeliads, and other epiphytal plants.

It is obvious, from what has been previously said, that human interference affects these internecine conflicts of plants very materially. It is clear also that the cultivator can very often avail himself of them to his own profit. From this point of view the experiments and observations carried on at Rothamsted by Mr. Lawes and Dr. Gilbert are most important, especially those relating to the struggle among pasture-plants, and the circumstances favoring certain plants more than their fellows. No detailed report of these particular experiments has hitherto been published, and only a few scattered notices in the Proceedings of the Horticultural Society (June 2, 1868) have appeared concerning them. We can, however, give some idea of their scope and nature by stating that a part of the park at Rothamsted, which has been under grass for centuries, has been divided into plots of equal size, placed side by side under conditions as nearly equal as possible. Some of these plots have been left unmanured; others, some twenty in number, have, for the last ten or twelve years, been subjected to various manures, the constitution and proportions of which are accurately determined. The general herbage of the park, like that of the unmanured plots, consists of some fifty species of plants, including sundry grasses, clovers, docks, umbellifers and other plants commonly found in such situations. In the several manured plots a change is observable, sometimes slight, at other times vast, and the change does not show itself so much in the superior luxuriance of any one plant, or in the starved condition of another, as it does in the more or less complete exclusion of certain plants, and in their replacement by others. Thus, while the unmanured plots contain, say, fifty species of plants, others comprise less than half that