Chemical Research on Plant Growth

Foreword.- Acknowledgments.- About the Translator.- Brief Biography of Théodore de Saussure.- 1.Introduction.- A. Plant nutrition concepts before the pioneering research on photosynthesis.- B. Contributions to knowledge of plant nutrition and physiology by the photosynthesis pioneers who preceded Théodore de Saussure.- C. De Saussure provides extensive quantitative data to address the important questions.- D. De Saussure's work enables completion of the overall chemical equation for photosynthesis.- E. Critical reception of Recherches chimiques sur la Végétation, its legacy, and historical perspectives.- F. Some errors and misinterpretations in Recherches chimiques sur la Végétation.- G.The life and scientific background of Théodore de Saussure.- References Cited.- 2.Chapter Summaries.- A Note on the Translation.- Translation of Recherches chimiques sur la Végétation.- Preface by Théodore de Saussure.- Table of Contents of the text.- The Text.- Appendices.- 1. Glossary of Terms.- 2. Conversions of Units of Measurement.- 3. Expanded Bibliography of References Cited by de Saussure.- Index

Nicholas-Théodore de Saussure, a Swiss plant physiologist and plant chemist, was the last of the early pioneers of photosynthesis research. This initial period of research is generally considered to have begun with Jan van Helmont in the early seventeenth century and Stephen Hales in the first part of the eighteenth, then to have become more intense with Joseph Priestley, Jan Ingen-Housz, and Jean Senebier during the Scientific Revolution of the mid-to-late eighteenth century. Nicholas-Théodore's father, the famous Swiss geologist, meteorologist, and Alpine explorer Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, had been an early convert to the new chemical theories pioneered by Antoine Lavoisier in the late eighteenth century. Nicholas-Théodore, younger than his predecessors, had the full advantage of this new approach, which stressed quantitative chemical methods. Applying these methods to plants, Nicholas-Théodore de Saussure performed experiments that led him to major insights into plant nutrition. His most important contributions were the demonstration that water is a component of plant dry matter; that plants obtain their carbon from the carbon dioxide of the air, not from carbonic acid dissolved in the soil water, as most of his contemporaries believed; and that mineral elements and nitrogen from the soil are essential to plant growth. Further, he demonstrated the central fact of plant respiration (the absorption of oxygen and emission of carbon dioxide); and photosynthesis (the decomposition of carbon dioxide and evolution of oxygen in the light). In Recherches Chimiques sur la Végétation, de Saussure synthesized his own research findings with those of his predecessors, producing a pioneering work on plant nutrition.

Translator: Jane F. Hill received an undergraduate degree in English from Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, USA, in 1968, and earned a master's degree in biology and a doctorate in botany from The George Washington University,