Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/1629/en

The life process of the field horsetail is a silica process, born out of the element of water and metabolically active. It moves from within outward toward the periphery of the living tissues. As the water evaporates through external warmth, the silica separates out and surrounds the whole stem-plant with a mantle of water-containing, amorphous silica. It is found in the epidermal cells as well as deposited between the cell membranes of these same cells. All states are traversed — from that of solution, through the plastic gel, to the hardened, amorphous, glass-like opal — a water-containing silicon dioxide (SiO₂ + H₂O). When the stem-herb of the field horsetail is incinerated, what remains after the black carbon skeleton has burned away is, at last, a white silica skeleton. It shows lens-like bulges that, in the living state, direct sunlight onto the chlorophyll arranged in rows.