A Garden of Marvels Page 33
and Priestley’s air experiments, 179, 182
for roots, 88, 100, 106–7, 109, 110, 111n, 191, 336, 343
RuBisCO gene and, 236
soil components and, 110, 113
and sound of dryness, 16
temperature of, 88
tomatoes and, 228
and van Helmont’s willow tree experiment, 170
and weight of plants, 191
See also algae; transpiration
Watson, William, 177
Wave petunias, 275, 309
wedding flowers, 244–45
weeds, 237, 334–35
Went, Frits, 333
West Virginia Extension Service, 111n
wheatgrass, 135–41, 147
White, Gilbert, 102–3
Wilkins, John, 43, 45, 64, 65
Willis, Thomas, 46
Willoughby, Francis, 46
willow trees: van Helmont’s experiment with, 170
wilting, 107
Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, 194–95
woody plants
anatomy of, 67
See also specific plant
World Health Organization, 340
World War I, 119–20
Wren, Christopher, 44, 45–47, 50
xylem, 67, 92, 93, 101, 106, 107, 110, 121, 126, 289, 336, 343
yellow dragon disease. See “the greening” disease
Zimbabwe: nickel farming in, 130
zinc, 123, 125
Also by Ruth Kassinger
Paradise Under Glass
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A GARDEN OF MARVELS. Copyright © 2014 by Ruth Kassinger. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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* The line between animate and inanimate is still is not perfectly clear, and modern science recognizes unusual organisms that straddle two categories. Outside a host cell, a virus is known as a virion and is simply an organic (that is, carbon-based) particle with no internal biologic activities. When a virion comes into contact with a host, it becomes a living virus, reacting to its environment and attempting to replicate. Certain algae are known as mixotrophs. As plants, they produce their own food through photosynthesis, but sometimes they sustain themselves by engulfing and digesting other plants and even their former predators, and then are classified as animals.
* Taxonomy, or the science of classification, of plants is a different matter. In the Renaissance, especially as European explorers brought home new species from Asia, Africa, and the Americas, people became absorbed in collecting, describing, displaying, naming, drying, painting, and categorizing plants. Carol Kaesuk Yoon explores the general history of taxonomy in Naming Nature: The Clash between Instinct and Science (New York: Norton, 2009); Anna Pavord recounts the early history of plant taxonomy in The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005).
* The term scientist would not be coined until 1834. Natural philosopher remained the term of art until then.
* For most readers, the minuscule realm was a marvel. However, the poet laureate of the day, Thomas Shadwell, called Hooke “a Sot, that has spent 2000 £ in Microscopes, to find out the nature of Eels in Vinegar, Mites in Cheese, and the Blue of Plums.”
* In early Christian Rome it had been forbidden to dissect humans, so Galen used Barbary apes and other animals, assuming their anatomy was essentially the same as humans’. When Vesalius attended the University of Paris in the 1530s, dissecting executed criminals for the purpose of teaching Galen was acceptable, although as a mere student Vesalius wasn’t given that opportunity. Undeterred, he stole bodies from gallows and graves outside the city walls. His 1543 masterwork, De Humani Coproris Fabrica, portrayed the anatomy of the human skeleton and musculature with far greater accuracy than ever before—and revealed that Galen hadn’t worked from human bodies. Following publication, he was so harassed and slandered by the Catholic Church and various university officials that he burned his unpublished work, renounced further scientific endeavors, and restricted himself to service as court physician, first to Emperor Charles V and later to King Philip II of Spain. He died at age fifty during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
* I have modernized Grew’s capitalization and punctuation for clarity.
* Chyle is actually a combination of lymphatic fluid and essential lipoproteins. Transported by blood, the lipoproteins are either stored or metabolized by different tissues in the body.
* In the early twentieth century, Germans Carl Bosch and Fritz Haber invented an industrial method of converting atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia. The rate at which nitrogen-fixing bacteria can convert nitrogen to N2 would have put a limit on the planet’s human population at about four billion people. Now, synthetic fertilizer made with the Haber-Bosch process provides food for nearly half the world’s current population of seven billion. Of course, all the additional terrestrial nitrogen and the increased human population and the concomitant increase in farm animal populations have had significant implications for the environment.
* The tree well was also too small. Tree wells can save a tree when the grade needs to be raised more than eighteen inches, but only if you provide good drainage and make sure the roots have access to air. According to the West Virginia Extension Service, well walls should extend at least three feet in all directions beyond the trunk’s circumference. Before adding topsoil, spread a one- to two-foot layer of rock and gravel over the entire root system and make sure excess water can drain beyond the root system.
* For example, French physician René Laënnec was consulted in 1816 by a young woman who he suspected had heart disease. Putting his ear to her chest for a diagnosis was impossible, given her sex and age. He happened, however, to remember “the distinctness with which we hear the scratch of a pin at one end of a piece of wood on applying our ear to the other.” He rolled a quire of paper into a cylinder, listened through it to her heart, and was delighted to find he could hear the beat more distinctly than if he’d put ear to skin. His stethoscope, as he named it, worked because the sound waves that would have dispersed in all directions were captured and redirected to his ear.
* Lavoisier used the term oxidation to describe reactions in which an element combines with oxygen. Later, oxidation was redefined as any reaction in which an atom loses electrons in its outermost shell to another atom, thereby becoming positively
charged.
* Much is unknown about the origins of eukaryotes, and there are many competing theories. The fusion could have been between two bacteria or, more likely, between a bacterium and an archaeon. Recent gene sequencing raises the possibility that eukaryotes may also have genes from an organism in a third single-celled kingdom that has left no modern descendants. This highly unlikely merger of three organisms could explain why the eukaryote evolved only once and all multicellular life is descended from it. Today, all multicellular eukaryotes are capable of reproducing sexually via mitosis and meiosis. (Dividing cells by mitosis is also the way a eukaryotic organism grows.) When, how, and why sexual reproduction developed is debated, and the story of eukaryote evolution is far from certain.
* Shed no tears for that former free-range cyanobacterium. Its descendants are found in all members of the plant kingdom, which now covers 75 percent of the earth’s land surface, from deserts to tundra, and constitutes 90 percent of the world’s biomass. As for the descendants of free-living cyanobacteria that didn’t shelter inside eukaryotes, they have diversified into more than six thousand species and occupy nearly every watery or damp niche on the planet. Altogether, cyanobacteria contribute half of the new biomass—55 billion tons—produced on Earth every year.
* Not until 1859 did Louis Pasteur finally scotch spontaneous generation completely.
* A relatively few plants—peas and peanuts, for example—do self-fertilize. Others, like the soybean, do so as a fallback method after cross-fertilization has failed. (The “nut” of the peanut plant, by the way, is actually a pollinated ovary of a flower whose stalk continues to grow while bending downward until the ovary is pushed into the ground, where the fruit ripens.)
* In 2013, a handful of larger companies were able to satisfy USDA’s requirements and started to ship trees out of state. A treatment for the greening may be on the horizon. Dr. Erik Mirkov, a plant pathologist at Texas A&M University, has transferred genes from spinach into citrus trees, and the spinach genes appear to confer a resistance to the disease. These transgenic trees (including Hamlins) are in field testing in Florida. Still, the disease may well mean, as Scientific American put it, “the end of orange juice.”