Birds and All Nature, Vol. 5, No. 2, February 1899: Illustrated by Color PhotographyVarious
History
Birds and All Nature, Vol. 5, No. 2, February 1899: Illustrated by Color Photography
Various
Birds -- Periodicals; Natural history -- Periodicals
At the present time ginger is not very extensively used as a medicine.
The powder or tincture is effective in some forms of indigestion.
It is used to correct a bad breath, in tooth-ache, as a gargle and
mouth-wash, in colic, and in dysentery. In a German work on pharmacy
I find that it is recommended in catarrh of the stomach and for
"Katzenjammer." It will not be necessary to explain Katzenjammer means.
SAP ACTION.
FRED. A. WATT.
In order to understand this subject we must first ascertain the
conditions under which sap is first produced, what it is, and how it
circulates.
To do this we must first know something of the structure of those parts
of the tree which serve as channels, or ducts, and those other parts
which gather the sap and dispose of the waste after it has completed
its mission.
To begin with, the tree is composed of small structures, too small for
the naked eye to distinguish. Each structure is, at least for a time,
a whole in itself, containing solid, semi-solid, and fluid parts which
differ in their chemical nature. These structures are the cells, and
when a large number of them are united in close contact they form a
cellular tissue through which the sap passes from the roots to the
leaves, and from the leaves to the growing parts of the young tree, or
shoot.
This cellular tissue is superseded by another tissue which is much
stronger and which takes up the work of the cellular tissue, when the
tree becomes too large to be supported by the weaker form. It is more
solidly formed and is composed of elongated cells which are joined
together in a series with their ends overlapping. This is known as
woody fiber. The cellular tissue now exists in the tree stem only in
the pith, and in the medullary rays which we see in the grain of any
hard wood, radiating from the pith.
With the statement, then, that these tissues form the timber, and that
the bark and roots only present a modification of the same structures,
we will pass to the tree as we see it with the naked eye.
If we saw the trunk of a tree, of any considerable size, squarely
in two, we find three forms which differ in solidity, rigidity, and
appearance; namely, the heart-wood, sap-wood, and bark. The heart-wood
is the firm, solid wood surrounding the center of the tree, the
sap-wood is the softer wood outside the heart-wood, while the bark
forms the skin or outer covering for the whole.
Trees grow from the center outward, hence the present sap-wood will in
time become heart-wood and be covered by a new layer of sap-wood, and
the present heart-wood is simply sap-wood which has become solidified
by the deposit within its tissues of resinous and other matter secreted
by the tree. It is now useless for sap-carrying purposes and seems to
exercise only the function of supporting the tree in its position. It
is through the outer, younger layer or sap-wood that the sap ascends.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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