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#PlantScienceClassics #8: Discoveries in Air. Joseph Priestley’s ‘Experiments and observations on different kinds of air’ in the 18th century formed the basis for the discovery and description of #photosynthesis. archive.org/details/experi… 
Jan van Helmont was one of the first scientists who found that the mass of a plant is not acquired from the soil it grows in. When he grew a 5 lb willow tree in 200 lb of soil for 4 years, he found that the tree gained 164 lb, while the soil was only reduced by 2 lb.
But van Helmont concluded that the plant gained its mass solely from the water he added & neglected the air, despite being the person to first isolate & describe carbon dioxide, which he assumed was a different form of air, in the mid-17th century.
