Posts by Miron Kiazim

Authentication is any process by which you verify that someone is who they claim they are. Authorization is any process by which someone is allowed to be where they want to go, or to have information that they want to have. There are three types of modules involved in the authentication and authorization process. You will usually need to choose at least one module from each group.

Analyses of the tissues of plants show that they contain all of the elements that are to be found in the soil on which they grew. Any of these elements which are present in the soil in soluble form are carried into the plants with the soil water in which they are dissolved, whether they are needed by the plant for its nutrition or not. But in the case of those elements which are not taken out of the sap to be used by the plant cells in their activities, the total amount taken from the soil is much less than is that of the elements which are used in the synthetic processes of the plant. Hence, much larger proportions of some elements than of others are taken from the soil by plants. The proportions of the different elements which

are used by plants as raw materials for the manufacture of the products needed for their growth varies with the different species; but a certain amount of each of the so-called "essential elements" (see below) is necessary to every plant, because each such element has a definite rôle which it performs in the plant's growth. A plant cannot grow to maturity unless a sufficient supply of each essential element comes to it from the soil.

With such a beautifully perfected mechanism for getting food it might seem as though all plants would be satisfied to lead that life of independence for which they are so splendidly equipped. Some of them, however, are like men in one respect: there seems to be no end to the chase after getting something for nothing. Those that stand on their own roots, get their food honestly, and take nothing for which they do not make prodigal returns, make up the great bulk of the vegetation of the earth. Their independence has dubbed them with the title autophytes, literally solitary or self-providing plants, and this thrifty mode of life is called autophytic. But a few kinds of plants, actually many millions of individuals, have more devious ways of getting their food and provide strong contrast to their sturdier associates.

These baser modes of life appear to have been rather insidiously developed, as though there had been some hesitation at even the smallest departure from the normal. Of course we must not forget that plants, while living things, are never reasoning ones, and that good and evil and all other qualities that are ascribed to plants are perfectly foreign to them. Throughout this book, and in many others, the habits of plants are spoken of as base, for instance, or good. What is actually the fact is that nature works in truly marvelous ways, and to our reasoning faculties these adjustments seem clothed with attributes they do not really possess. But the description of them in the terms of our everyday speech, the translation of their behavior into the current conceptions of mankind, does so fix them in our minds that they cease to be “just plants,” and we no longer put their habits in the category of those interesting things that nearly everyone forgets.