Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 May 1875 — Silica as Plant Food. [ARTICLE]

Silica as Plant Food.

Almost ever since we commenced reading agricultural books and papers we have seen sand recommended as a fertilizer for low, swampy soils, and the reason given for applying it was that plants needed silica to enable them to support themselves. We have accordingly made frequent applications of sandy soil to our meadow-land, supposing that unless material were present the grass and grains would be so soft and limber that they would fall to tbe ground before coming to maturity, and it was not till we saw the truth of the silex theory denied by Prof. Johnson, of the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale College, that we supposed there was any doubt whatever in the matter. Prof. Johnson claims that this idea of silex being taken up by plants forrhe purpose of stiffening the straw originated with Sir Humphrey Davy, not, however, as an assertion, but as a suggestion, and that agricultural writers accepted the theory at first as reasonable hut after a while as fact, and so the theory has come down to us almost without question. Two investigators, however, in Germany, have, as they think, demonstrated the falsity of this idea, viz.: Dr. Julius Sachs, formerly of the Royal Saxon Academy of Agriculture and Forestry at Tharandt, and Dr. Wilhelm Ivnop, of the University of Leipsic, and for some years Director of the Mceckern Experimental Station. These gentlemen grew corn and oats in water containing a sufficient amount of soluble plant-food adapted to their needs but with only the minutest quantity of silica, and yet they were equal in strength to the field-grown plants containing 1| per cent, of silica.— New England Farmer.