Gini In The Bottle

摘要

In the 1770s, Joseph Priestley, the father of biogeochemistry1, conducted his famous experiments in which he placed mice and mint plants in bottles, and discovered the balance between 'putrefying' and 'regenerative' processes. Priestley thus began the tradition of using organisms in microcosms to explore nature. He and his colleagues clearly recog nized the global significance of his findings, despite their small scale. On page 623 of this issue, Wittebolle et al. describe ecological research in that tradition, but carried out with twenty-first-century tools.rnLife on Earth is more than mice and mint, of course, with most ecosystems containing hundreds to thousands of plant, animal and microbial species. The balance between 'putrefying' and 'regenerative' processes in nature is better known today as the balance between respiration, decomposition, photosynthesis, primary production and many other ecosystem functions carried out by species that cycle matter between inorganic and organic forms.