Note 7 — Chapter XIII · POTASSIUM, RUBIDIUM, CÆSIUM, AND LITHIUM. SPECTRUM ANALYSIS

As plants always contain mineral substances and cannot thrive in a medium which does not contain them, more especially in one which is free from the salts of the four basic oxides, K2O, CaO, MgO, and Fe2O3, and of the four acid oxides, CO2, N2O5, P2O5, and SO3, and as the amount of ash-forming substances in plants is small, the question inevitably arises as to what part these play in the development of plants. With the existing chemical data only one answer is possible to this question, and it is still only a hypothesis. This answer was particularly clearly expressed by Professor Gustavson of the Petroffsky Agricultural Academy. Starting from the fact (Chapter XI., Note 55) that a small quantity of aluminium renders possible or facilitates the reaction of bromine on hydrocarbons at the ordinary temperature, it is easy to arrive at the conclusion, which is very probable and in accordance with many data respecting the reactions of organic compounds, that the addition of mineral substances to organic compounds lowers the temperature of reaction and in general facilitates chemical reactions in plants, and thus aids the conversion of the most simple nourishing substances into the complex component parts of the plant organism. The province of chemical reactions proceeding in organic substances in the presence of a small quantity of mineral substances has as yet been but little investigated, although there are already several disconnected data concerning reactions of this kind, and although a great deal is known with regard to such reactions among inorganic compounds. The essence of the matter may be expressed thus—two substances, A and B, do not react on each other of their own accord, but the addition of a small quantity of a third particularly active substance, C, produces the reaction of A on B, because A combines with C, forming AC, and B reacts on this new compound, which has a different store of chemical energy, forming the compound AB or its products, and setting C free again or retaining it.

It may here be remarked that all the mineral substances necessary for plants (those enumerated at the beginning of the note) are the highest saline compounds of their elements, that they enter into the plants as salts, that the lower forms of oxidation of the same elements (for instance, sulphites and phosphites) are harmful to plants (poisonous), and that strong solutions of the salts assimilated by plants (their osmotic pressure being great and contracting the cells, as De Vries showed, (see Chapter I., Note 19)) not only do not enter into the plants but kill them (poison them).