The Most Important Function Of Sap

As a student of Nature, I often call the leaves on trees “laboratories”. They are, in fact, something more. They serve as chemical factories where the lifeless, inorganic material taken from air, sunshine, and soil is transformed into the living, organic material that makes up the plant. If we knew just how this is done we might have some inkling as to the nature of that mysterious process we call life. But we only know that this translation from the lifeless to the living which takes place, presto chango, high up in the branches is due in some manner to the chlorophyl, those little green bodies that give the leaves their color. The green grains of chlorophyl, microscopically small, have the power to screen out all the light rays except the red, violet, and indigo. With these they act on the tree's raw foodstuffs. Out of the atmosphere come minute particles of carbon dioxide, and from the ground beneath comes water and small quantities of mineral. Concentrating the useful rays of sunlight as with tiny focussing lenses, the chlorophyl breaks up the carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen and unites the carbon with water to form grape sugar.

Every forest tree, every potted plant, constantly carries on this process; but in the laboratories of man, the separation of these chemical elements requires a temperature of 1,200 centigrade—a heat that melts the hardest steel! Much of the grape sugar is turned into starch and stored in cells for future use. An average tree in the course of a day manufactures twenty pounds of starch. A third substance made is inulin, which closely resembles starch. Out of these three substances, derived from air, water, and sunlight, the dense body tissues of trees are fashioned. Giant sequoias that had withstood a thousand storms before Christ was born; tropical trees with wood so flint-like that no nail can pierce them—these no less than the tiniest, most delicate fern have been built up cell by cell in a kind of microscopic agglomeration of insubstantial materials, transported and laid down by the sap.

Here, then, is the sap's most important function: first to bring to the leaves the raw foodstuffs derived from the soil; and second, when its tissue-building materials have been prepared by the leaves, to nourish the whole body of the tree. It is truly a vital task. More recently it has been found that the circulation of sap serves a less obvious, but vital, purpose, like that of the circulation of water in the radiator of an automobile. A tree, in a sense, is no less a machine than an automobile or turbine. It is a tissue-building engine, and the chemical changes carried on within it generate heat. Added to this is the heat of the sun's rays, which alone would rapidly shrivel a plant to a lifeless, husk were it not for the circulation and evaporation of water.

By: davidbunch

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