22 What the Generation of Plants Is, Which Principles Constitute Them, and Into Which They Resolve Again

Chapter outline

The stages of vegetable generation and the plant as an intermediary between animals and minerals

Roots as magnets and nutrition through salts and vapours

The circulation of subterranean and atmospheric nourishment

The production of nitre and salt in soils and manures

Practical trials concerning germination and plant growth

The resolution of vegetables and the relation of volatile and fixed principles

Tree of vegetable generation. 1. The sperm, or dry seed, subsequently dissolved in the earth and made watery: the vegetable Gur. 2. Formation of the root. 3. Formation of the stalk and branching leaves. 4. Formation of the flowers. 5. Formation of the soft seed, or knot, when the flowers gather into a knotted formation of seed. 6. Formation and hardening of the seed and its perfect coagulation.

This kingdom is a kingdom of wonders, as wonderful as the first, and may rightly be called the sugared and sweetened kingdom. Although, in defiance of the animal kingdom, it carries and produces the most bitter individual things, through this kingdom the bitterest substances, the most harmful poisons, and corrosives nevertheless become as sweet as sugar and honey within a few hours. Observe, however, that this does not happen without the animal kingdom, which must be nourished by the vegetable kingdom and live upon it. Conversely, the vegetable kingdom is fertilized and nourished by the animals’ excrements and dead bodies, and each is maintained by the other. Let the practitioner mark this as carefully as what preceded it.

Secondly, this kingdom is a true hermaphrodite and Janus: it is neither animal nor mineral, but both, and stands in the middle condition. With one eye it looks toward the animal kingdom and with the other toward the mineral. It can equally become animal or mineral, according to the process of transmutation undertaken by nature or art. It associates intimately with the first and last—that is, the animal kingdom and the kingdom of ores—and longs for them. For we see with our own eyes that herbs and trees become worms and thus acquire a life; we also see many trees turn to stone, especially those that stand and grow in water, most commonly in the sea, where it is heavily salted. All plants are generated from their own seed, or from seed infused by the stars; and, in an improper sense, by the propagation of grafts, which are already seed that has unfolded or opened. Here, however, we wish to discuss the first matter of plants, or their seed, to improve the understanding of a beginner in the knowledge of nature.

As soon as the seed enters the earth, which is moist, nitrous, and salty, as demonstrated above, it is moistened by water, the moisture of the earth, rain, and so forth, and is dissolved by the salts. It swells, bursts open, and dissolves into a milky, slimy water. This may be seen when a seed is steeped in such a water of nitre and salt: first it begins to swell, then to break open, and finally to become slime. This slime is then the immediate first matter of a plant and may be called the vegetable Gur. This vegetable juice or Gur is heated and warmed by the central heat and that of the sun, and begins to send vapours above the earth. Its most volatile part passes into the air and the Chaos. The other part, which is less volatile and has a contracting nature, is coagulated by the cold air into a root and stalk, with fine, tender, soft little leaves. This is the plant’s initial generation. The more fixed part becomes the root, the less fixed the stalk, and the still more volatile the leaves; but at first everything is soft, tender, young, still full of moisture, and therefore weak.

The root is the plant’s magnet. It attracts food from the earth, the arriving rain, the air, and so forth, and conveys nourishment to the plant until it becomes a strong herb or tree. As every examination shows, its nourishment is nothing other than the earth and the water concealed within it. The earth receives the subterranean vapours that rise from the centre of the earth, as the universal kingdom, toward the earth’s circumference and surface and to the plants. Water, however, contains the two universal seeds, nitre and salt. Salt is more important than nitre, because it is the magnet that must draw nourishing moisture from below and above. These salts are continually generated from dew, rain, snow, and so forth, as explained above; also from subterranean vapours coming from the centre, and from the surrounding air, which is filled with immeasurable atoms. They also arise, in part, where people assist nature with manure carried to fields, meadows, vineyards, and gardens, or where various kinds of livestock go and deposit their excrements. According as the earth receives much or little, it bears much or little, rich or poor, large or small fruit.

For now we shall set aside all other nutriments and speak only of universal nourishment—dew and rain, and the nitre and salt arising from them—because the other nutriments originally spring from these and are also reduced back into them, namely nitre and salt, as sufficiently demonstrated above. Salt, or the fixed part of the nourishment, is the mother and magnet. As stated above, it is made from nitre into salt and fixed through the earthly and solar heat by reverberation. It attracts nourishment and increases itself from dew, rain, and so forth, and gives birth to a nitre that it takes to itself from putrefied rain and holds fast. So that the heat of the sun and earth can no longer drive it off, the salt fixes the subtle nitre. The plant’s root attracts these two salts, dissolved by means of water, makes them through digestion into a clear spirit and vapour, and sends them in the form of vapour through the narrow pores into the stalk and leaves, where they carry out their growth according to their predestination.

The salts do not enter the plant’s nourishment merely in their own nature. They dissolve the earth, making it subtle too and turning it into a clear, salty water. Then it can be further subtilized by the root and become nourishment. Nature has similarly endowed animals with the ability to send into the stomach the food ground and prepared by teeth and tongue. There a salty, bitter liquor further subtilizes the prepared food and makes it into a liquid pulp, which it then sends into the mesentery. There the best juice is extracted and, through the pores and by natural heat, is sublimed and distilled upward as vapour into the liver and other members. These vapours settle in the vessels of the liver and other members and resolve back into water; the heat again resolves this water into vapour and sublimes or circulates it into still higher members. This continues without ceasing until it has reached its perfection.

For who could imagine and understand how nature should convey watery, juicy nourishment upward to the liver in animals when it is heavy with water? Rather, it should sink downward and run out through the excretory passages. But if nature turns the nourishment into vapour, which passes outward through all the body’s pores as sweat passes to the skin, that vapour can likewise condense into water by thickening in the moist places proper to it, until circulation coagulates it into blood, flesh, cartilage, and bone. To see that nature truly nourishes all creatures through vapour alone, look only at the macrocosm: by its inward heat it forcibly makes water into vapour from the earth’s lowest centre, drives it out to the highest heaven, and there thickens and makes it heavy again, so that it becomes water and falls back to earth by its own weight. We see the same in all animals, the macrocosm’s children. The child resembles its father and mother: from the innermost depths of the stomach, nature drives moisture outward as vapour to the outermost skin between the toes and fingers; by thickening, it resolves and condenses into water, which we call sweat.

We see, moreover, that vapours in mines and mountains are powerful: they settle upon the earth’s inward parts, and from them the ores are born—mark this, from the vapours. If this happens in both kingdoms, nature will make no special exception for plants. Since it has been shown that all creatures send nourishment in the form of vapour into all their members and thereby sustain and attain their growth, they rightly follow their origin. Each and every one sprang from the universal, general vapour or Chaos, which became water through condensation. The lesser things must therefore be governed by the greater. Just as they spring from vapour and are nourished and maintained by it, so in their decay they become water; heat turns that water into vapour, and the vapour enters something else and again becomes corporeal according to the nature of its subject. Nor should anyone imagine that plants attract their watery nutriments in this raw state, even as vapour, and receive nourishment from them. No: if they took in the vaporized water with its entire substance, most plants would become wholly watery, soft, and short-lived. The superfluous water would rouse the spirit to action, and scarcely would a plant have grown before it rotted and collapsed again.