Vegetable Staticks; Or, An Account of Some Statical Experiments on the Sap in Vegetables

1727

Hist. Coll. QKA H168

London: Printed for W. and J. Innys, and T. Woodward

Stephen Hales was a clergyman and an accomplished experimental scientist who studied the flow of fluids and gases through living tissues. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society. In Vegetable Staticks, Hales revealed the rising of sap and transpiration (water movement) through leaves. In order to collect the gases given off by plants, he devised a system where gases were passed through a glass tube to a bottle inverted over a water bath. This is now known as the ‘pneumatic trough’ and was used by Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestley in their chemical experiments.