Its water :)
Good luck :)
From water(It was Jan Van Helmont not Jan Can Helmont)
Van Helmont concluded that most of the mass the plant gained had come from water.
Jan van Helmont
Jan van Helmont concluded that most of the gain in mass had come from water, because that was the only thing that he added.
Jan Van Helmont. in his 5-year experiment he planted a seedling in soil and watered it. it grew to a small treegaining 75kg. mass of soil didn't change. since water was all he added, he concluded it was from the water. - from Prentice Hall Texas Biology Book (9th grade)
Jan Van Helmont
Van Helmont proved that plants got most of they're mass from water and nutrients in the soil. he also proved that plants release a combustible gas.
He grew a willow tree in a carefully weighed amount of soil. He noticed that little of the soil was consumed, but that the weight of the tree greatly increased. He concluded that the extra weight came from the water. His willow tree experiment was one of the first to use quantitative measurements. Van Helmont wanted to understand digestion chemically, believed all substances could be reduced to air and water, and thought that acid/base reactions were fundamental.
The "living tree" experiment was a scientific study performed originally by Jan Baptiste van Helmont (1580-1644) and thereafter repeated by several other scientists in the decades and centuries following. Van Helmont measures the weight of the tree at the start of the experiment (five pounds) as well as the weight of the soil (200 pounds). After five years of regularly watering the tree, van Helmont noted that the soil only lost about 2 ounces of weight while the tree weighed an astonishing 164 pounds. He concluded that because the tree did not gain all this weight from the soil, it must have gained it from the water intake. Although we now know that plants gain much of their mass from photosynthesis/carbon dioxide as well as soil, van Helmont's experiment has been lauded as an early example of strict attention to detail and experimental controls.
Plant mass related to H2o is related to the research of Van Helmont. Van Helmont was a well-known botanist.
Van Helmont's hypothesis was that plants gain most of their biomass from water, rather than from soil as previously believed. He conducted an experiment which involved growing a willow tree in a known amount of soil and watering only with rainwater, and found that the tree's mass significantly increased while the soil mass decreased only marginally, leading him to conclude that water was the main source of a plant's growth.
Van Helmont