3 How Nature Destroys Plants

Chapter outline

Moisture and heat awaken the innate acid of withered plants

The author's explanation of insects arising from plant matter

The prolonged decay of trees through internal and external causes

Natural calcination, compost, and the acceleration of decomposition

Rainwater as ferment and the volatile and acid as agents of putrefaction

Plants can be observed in somewhat more agreeable air than animals. After withering, they fall away and are wetted by rain and dew, which awaken the innate acid—that is, make it volatile. It grows lukewarm, warm, and hot, partly through the implanted spirit and partly through the added heat of the sun and the centre. Central heat continually breathes and radiates upward from below, just as the sun does downward from above; in winter one can readily feel such warmth of the earth in cellars. This awakened acid passes through the herb's pores and awakens or heats its volatile part so that it rises into the air as vapour, to become chaotic there. It softens the more fixed and harder part, making it slime and juice, which creep into the earth and mingle with it, awaiting regeneration there and transformation by the earth into the more fixed chaotic seed, saltpetre and salt. Also, when the heat dries too strongly, worms and maggots arise from the volatile part of the herb, and from these come gnats and flies. This indicates that the vegetable kingdom tends to become animal or volatile. One sees the same thing in trees and herbs that are still green, when the abundant, dripping sap begins to rot: whole nests of worms arise from it, and from these flying caterpillars and all kinds of other winged insects. Such is the destruction of small plants.

With larger plants, such as trees, nature has a harder struggle before she brings a withered tree back to the first matter, or chaotic water. One tree outlasts another by many long years before falling into mould and dust. How, then, does nature deal with them? In this way. First, when the tree's spirit of vegetation has died, the tree withers. The root draws in no sap to nourish it, but loses its attractive power. It no longer feeds the trunk and can no longer separate the subtle from the coarse; hence the leaves fall away. Through its pores, the tree is filled inwardly with putrid vapours. These begin to rot and gradually soften its parts, as was said before, kindling the radical moisture toward the contrary condition. For as soon as the balsamic spirits have left the tree, the principles enter into a contrary dissolution in accordance with an unalterable predestination. Since the tree has lost the nourishment needed to expel the harmful heterogeneous matter, they attack the whole tree, making it friable and mouldering, so that inwardly, from the heartwood to the outermost bark, it becomes entirely spongy, soft, mouldering, and crumbly.

From outside, heat and cold, sun and rain attack it. The sun heats the tree throughout, so that the heat often splits it, because its preserving moisture has left it and passed into the contrary condition. Then rain comes and wets it. Since the tree is hot and dried out by the sun, it eagerly draws in moisture, to its own harm. The moisture penetrates through the pores and putrefies within, meeting no resistance from the preserving power that has now departed. Thus this moisture rots and fills the tree with decay. The sun returns, heating it throughout once more, opening its pores and making ample room for putrefaction to penetrate through the opened pores into the whole tree and bring it entirely into decay. When the rain comes again, the first entry has already made a passage, allowing it to reach farther the second time and infect the whole tree with putrefaction. This is what heat and moisture do. Cold assists its destruction still more powerfully, attacking it throughout because its native heat has departed. When the sun comes and warms the tree, the cold within its penetrated pores melts into water. This water lodges in the tree's heart and core and begins to rot, making the tree swollen, friable, rotten, and mouldering, inside and out. Nature continues this until the tree is rotten throughout and at last collapses into nothing but mould and dust. This, then, is vegetable calcination.

Let someone consider the same process in the animal kingdom, in bones: it happens in just this way. But it does not occur all at once, so that we could observe it with our eyes in a short time. It proceeds slowly. Such a calcination often lasts longer than the lives of three men, and longer still in hard wood, for a little of the tree passes away, and then a little more. We see a faster example in water-willows and elms, which display such decay daily because of their superfluous moisture. Once the tree has been calcined and become mould, however, it rots all the faster and returns to the first being, namely nitre and salt, within a year and often in a few months or weeks. Gardeners use it for their manure; there it quickly rots together and changes into first matter. But if human art and hands reduce the tree to shavings and sawdust, or otherwise make it small, and moisten it with putrid rainwater, it rots away quickly, indeed in a few weeks or days, as experience shows. If one has need of a tree's sawdust, it can be moistened with putrid rainwater and left standing a while. It quickly heats up in the air, putrefies, becomes foul-smelling and rotten, and at last passes into a thick water. Unless this is prevented, it becomes full of worms and maggots, and finally gnats. When these decay, a small earthy putrid residue remains, as I have experienced with several herbs and woods.

If this is prevented, the rotted plants can be used to manure gardens, while chymistry can separate their principles by distillation. Such is the natural separation, or calcination and destruction, of plants into their first state. Someone might ask why I used putrefied rainwater for this, and what rainwater contains that assists putrefaction, or which principle in it causes putrefaction. I shall answer. First, as I have demonstrated, everything is destroyed again with and through it, for it is their homogeneous fermenting ferment. Some chymists do, with good reason, mix in sourdough, beer yeast, or wine lees. But I have chosen rainwater to make my point, because I wish only to show that everything is born from chaotic water alone and that everything is destroyed again through it. The reader can judge which principle causes putrefaction. Alkali is balsamic; therefore the volatile and acid are destructive. Rainwater is visibly more volatile than fixed, and likewise contains more acid than alkali. It follows that the volatile and acid are the agents of putrefaction.

Just as the juicy parts of animals putrefy relatively quickly, while the hard and dry parts do so more slowly, so too succulent plants rot faster, and hard plants more slowly. Minerals likewise putrefy still more slowly—slowest of all—and are more enduring than everything mentioned before. For everything juicy and moist by nature rots more quickly after its balsamic life-spirit has died. But with anything firm, dense, hard, and dry by nature, nature must work harder and longer, and does so at the immediate command of the Creator. Water and moisture are instruments of the all-working spirit for putrefaction, and putrefaction is the master key for unlocking and locking each and every thing in nature.