Show What the Cell can do J Water earth salt and the gasea be raw materials which the plants tuck up8re changed with the cella into starch and sugar gum and woody fiber albumen and wax oil and resin into powerful medicines and deadly poisons The simplest plant possesses an art which the most skillful chemist has not been able to learn from it It is true that the chemist can artifioially prepare in his laboratory many of the substances which the plantcell likewise produces he can convert the starch of the potato into the sugar that gives the winegrape its sweetness this again he can transform into the fruitacids which in connection with the sugar giva the berries their fresh and agreeable agree-able taste he can even produce the flavor of the fruits from the fusel oil which he obtains by the fermentation of the sugar He can make the oil of bitter almonds from benzoio and formic for-mic acids he can with as good art imitate the pungent taste ot the pep perand the biting one of the mustard seed and the narcotic poison which only the night shade has hither prepared pre-pared for the healing of Eore eyes He can produce from the sap of firs the crystalneedles of the vanilla for which a Mexican orchid has heretofore hereto-fore been obliged to give up its pods from the distillation of wood he obtains ob-tains a smoky fluid from which he procures salicylic acid for the production pro-duction of which the flowers of the meadow sweet or the bark tissues of the willow were formerly required and from this ho makes also the ink coloring gallic acid which formerly only a hula wasp knew how to draw out by its sting from the cells of the oak and the aroma oftbe woodrnB He has made the work of the cells of the madderroot superfluous for he has fabricated in costly dyes along with a hundred other splendid pigments pig-ments out of taroil and stonecoal and is now on the point of taking its work from the indigoplant by arti 4 ficially producing indigo But the raw material which baa at some time been brought forth out of the laboratory I labora-tory of a living plantcell always lies at the foundation of all these manipulations manip-ulations of the chemist wonderful as they are And notwithstanding the immense progress that modern chemistry has made within the last ten year its art Lis still limited at this point no prospect yet exists that it will be able artificially to produce the most important of all the substances substan-ces that go to build up th q bcdies of animals and plants and to form their living planttissues protoplasm or au envelope of the plantcell the matter of the muscles and nerves Popular Science Monthly |