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Excerpt from Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, Vol. 21: 1897-1898
The old Greek naturalists thought that the food of plants was elaborated beforehand in the earth, as in a stomach, and it took centuries of work to establish the fact that what the ordinary plant takes up by its roots in the absorbed water is only mineral matters of the ash, constituting but a minute fraction of the food-materials of the plant (absolutely essential, however), to be worked up in the leaves with the far larger quantities of gases there taken in and assimilated in the chlorophyll apparatus by means of energy obtained from the sun.
It was part of the price to be paid for rescuing the physiology of plant-nutrition from the grip of the old ideas of Aristotle, in the disastrous more modern form they had assumed in 1835 - 40 when the humus theory held sway, that soil came to be regarded as merely a mineral medium of value to the plant in preportion to its contents in certain chemical salts.
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