Personality of plants

SCIENCE IN THE PLANT WORLD
of the air which man and animals contaminate.
Besides this general use of gases common
to nearly all plants, a few of the members of
the vegetable world specialize in the production
of protective and poisonous vapours of various
composition. One of the most interesting of
these is the Gas Plant of the South American
jungles. This beautiful white-flowered in-
habitant of the tropics is entirely protected from
leaf-destroying insects and birds by the poi-
sonous vapours it constantly pours forth.
The plants are expert chemists, and the reac-
tions in which they engage are, on the whole,
much simpler than those which go on in the
bodies of animals. Vegetable tissue is largely
carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. It is
a curious fact that instead of using the abundant
carbon compounds present in decomposed animal
and vegetable matter of the soil the plants
get most of their carbon from the carbon dioxide
of the air. Inversely, they largely disregard the
seventy-eight per cent nitrogen of the air, and
extract that element from the complicated com-
pounds found in the soil, or take it from the
air only by aid of certain Bacteria.
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