SOIL BACTERIA.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 436, 3 February 1912, Page 6

SOIL BACTERIA.

Writing in the Pacific Rural Press, C. B. Lipman, instructor in soil bacterioligy in the University of California, says that we are just beginning to get an insight into the complex and profound reactions which go on in the Eoil in the preparation of plant food by bacteria and other micro-oragnisms. Thep resence of bacteria in the soil is essential to plant life. Bacteria are plant cells so small that 2(1,000 of them would not make a'row more than one inch long, but under favourable conditions they multiply by dividing themselves with inconceivable rapidity. One cell may have 200,000 descendants within 24 hours. They are omnipresent not only in the soli, but in the air the water, and in all plant and animal life. They are the agents, not only of life, but of decay. They exist in three forms—the round, cal'ed the "coccus"; the red-shaped, called the "bacillus"; and the corkBcrew form, called "spirillum." The work of bacteria in the soil is as yet but imperfectly understood, and most of the study thus far given to the subject has been with respect to the bacteria which develop nitrogen and make it available to plants. There are two general classes of these bacteria, of which one causes the formation of nitrogen compounds insoluble in water and the other changes these compounds into forms available to the plant. It is evident that we are as yet only on the threshold of knowledge of the wonderful processes which create and renew fertility in the soil, and we can hardly conjecture what will be known upon this subject by those who are alive a century hence.