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He says a young man from Washington gave a lecture at his college down in North Carolina, in which he informed them that the cause of infertility of soils is a poisonous substance excreted by the plant itself, and that this can be overcome by changing from one crop to another because the excrete of one plant, while poisonous to that plant, will not be poisonous to other plants of a different kind.
The obvious reason for this is that our organs of elimination are intended and constructed to excrete only such waste products as are formed in the organism in the processes of metabolism.
Glands of this sort were loosely regarded as organs for excretion, without much consideration of the question whether, in vegetable life, there could be any need to excrete, or any advantage gained by throwing off such products; and, while the popular name of catch-fly, given to several common species of Silene, indicates long familiarity with the fact, probably no one ever imagined that the swarms of small insects which perish upon these sticky surfaces were ever turned to account by the plant.
Humus, he said, is one of the very best substances for destroying these toxic excrete although they had some other things which were as good or better than any sore of fertilizing materials.
In all severe diseases digestion is almost or quite at a standstill and the food given under the circumstances decomposes in the alimentary tract and furnishes additional poison for the system to excrete. Food under the circumstances is a detriment and a burden to the body. In fevers, the temperature goes up after feeding. This shows that more poison has entered the blood.
After this interval, I felt sure that the aphides would want to excrete. I watched them for some time through a lens, but not one excreted; I then tickled and stroked them with a hair in the same manner, as well as I could, as the ants do with their antennæ; but not one excreted.
The reason is not clearly known, unless it be from the sudden retention of poisonous exhalations. The Skin and the Kidneys. There is a close relationship between the skin and the kidneys, as both excrete organic and saline matter. In hot weather, or in conditions producing great activity of the skin, the amount of water excreted by the kidneys is diminished.
What is this mysterious complex of processes and phenomena, common to everything animate, from the seaweed to the rose, and from the human body to the bacterium, this ability to “move” of itself, to change and yet to remain like itself, to take up dead substances into itself, to assimilate and to excrete, to initiate and sustain, in respiration, in nutrition, in external and internal movements, the most complex chemical and physical processes, to develop and build up through a long series of stages a complete whole from the primitive beginnings in the germ, to grow, to become mature, and gradually to break up again, and with all this to repeat in itself the type of its parent, and to bring forth others like itself, thus perpetuating its own species, to react effectively to stimuli, to produce protective devices against injury, and to regenerate lost parts?
There is something there that seizes hold of the droplets of oil by means of little extruded processes, and then passes them through its own body to excrete them on an inner surface into the blood-vessels. "This fat absorption thus appears to be a vital process and not one simply controlled by physical forces like osmosis.
An eminent physiologist accounts for the presence of rudimentary organs, by supposing that they serve to excrete matter in excess, or injurious to the system; but can we suppose that the minute papilla, which often represents the pistil in male flowers, and which is formed merely of cellular tissue, can thus act?
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