He is in fact to all intents and purposes of the north.
Natives were openly transferred from one Boer to another, and the fact that they were described as apprentices by the farmers did not in the least alter the status of the native, who to all intents and purposes became the property of his master.
But the great achievement of recent manufacture is the production, without the use of animal charcoal, of a cheaper, but good and wholesome article, in appearance equal to refined sugar for all intents and purposes, except for making preserves of fruits in the old-fashioned way.
From this moment until his death Mahmud was, to all intents and purposes, the " vassal of Russia," though not without occasional desperate efforts to break his chains.
The first volume, Vegetable Staticks (1727), contains an account of numerous experiments in plant-physiology - the loss of water in plants by evaporation, the rate of growth of shoots and leaves, variations in root-force at different times of the day, &c. Considering it very probable that plants draw "through their leaves some part of their nourishment from the air," he undertook experiments to show in "how great a proportion air is wrought into the composition of animal, vegetable and mineral substances"; though this "analysis of the air" did not lead him to any very clear ideas about the composition of the atmosphere, in the course of his inquiries he collected gases over water in vessels separate from those in which they were generated, and thus used what was to all intents and purposes a "pneumatic trough."
