[7]As I have said in my Essay, That a Soil being once proper to a Species of Vegetables, it will always continue to be so; it must be supposed, that there be no Alteration of the Heat and Moisture of it; and that this Difference I mean, is of its Quality of nourishing different Species of Vegetables, not of the Quantity of it; which Quantity may be alter’d by Diminution or Superinduction.
So for Heat; our Earth, when it has in the Stove the just Degree of Heat that each Sort of Plants requires, will maintain Plants brought from both the Indies.
Plants differ as much from one another in the Degrees of Heat and Moisture they require, as a Fish differs from a Salamander.
Indeed Misletoe, and some other Plants, will not live upon Earth, until it be first alter’d by the Vessels of another Plant or Tree, upon which they grow, and therein are as nice in Food as an Animal.
There is no need to have Recourse to Transmutation; for whether Air or Water, or both, are transform’d into Earth or not, the thing is the same, if it be Earth when the Roots take it; and we are convinced that neither Air nor Water alone, as such, will maintain Plants.
These kind of Metamorphoses may properly enough be consider’d in Dissertations purely concerning Matter, and to discover what the component Particles of Earth are; but not at all necessary to be known, in relation to the maintaining of Vegetables.
CHAP. III.
Of Pasture of Plants.
Cattle feed on Vegetables that grow upon the Earth’s external Surface; but Vegetables themselves first receive, from within the Earth, the Nourishment they give to Animals.
The Pasture of Cattle has been known and understood in all Ages of the World, it being liable to Inspection; but the Pasture of Plants, being out of the Observation of the Senses, is only to be known by Disquisitions of Reason; and has (for ought I can find) pass’d undiscover’d by the Writers of Husbandry[8].
[8]When Writers of Husbandry, in discoursing of Earth and Vegetation, come nearest to the Thing, that is, the Pasture of Plants, they are lost in the Shadow of it, and wander in a Wilderness of obscure Expressions, such as Magnetism, Virtue, Power, Specific Quality, Certain Quality, and the like; wherein there is no manner of Light for discovering the real Substance, but we are left by them more in the Dark to find it, than Roots are when they feed on it: And when a Man, no less sagacious than Mr. Evelyn, has trac’d it thro’ all the Mazes of the Occult Qualities, and even up to the Metaphysics, he declares he cannot determine, whether the Thing he pursues be Corporeal or Spiritual.