In recent decades the understanding of mineral nutrition in plants has been greatly advanced through the use of isotopic tracers. Relatively little research has been done with nitrogen presumably because of high costs of instrumentation and isotopes. A few investigations on the path of translocation and on rates of reactions have been reported. For example, Sansing 10 observed different responses of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus translocation to steaming of the plant stem, a result that was interpreted as an indication of different patterns of translocation for the three nutrients. Burr et al. 2 investigated movement of labeled nitrogen in the sugar cane plant. After two days, the highest label was Jn presumably maturing leaves rather than in young, developing tissues. Nitrogen is rapidly incorporated into amino acids 3, which might also be expected from diurnal changes of amino acid concentrations in tobacco plants which have been shown by Japanese workers with help of natural nitrogen s Until recently, the mass spectrometer has been generally used for N15-analyses. Based on investigations by Hoch and Weiser 5, Hiirzeller and Hostettler 6, and of Broida and Chapman 1, a successful optical spectroscopic method for N15-analyses was described by Faust 4. This procedure has since been applied by