Abstract
TPHROUGHOUT the unnumbered ages which have witnessed the rise and fall of successive civilisations upon this planet, the one thing that has stood between mankind and extinction by lack of food has been the activity of the chloro-plast of the green leaf. Perhaps, before equal time has again rolled over the world, the synthetic production of food may have been achieved, and man in all his intellectual glory may claim equality with the lilies of the field. Until then the fixation of organic carbon by “photosynthesis” in green cells must, by us, be regarded as the basal chemical happening of our planet. Thousands of years of empiric agriculture have enabled man to exploit this aspect of vegetation with remarkable success, but the problem of carbon assimilation found its way into the laboratory only at the end of the eighteenth century by the genius of Priestley, and its broad aspects were first formulated by the wisdom of De Saussure in 1812.
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B., F. The Green Leaf: Its Scientific and Economic Exploitation. Nature 100, 464–467 (1918). https://doi.org/10.1038/100464c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/100464c0