LIBRARY 
 
 OF TIT it 
 
 UNIVERSITY. OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 Ol T^T O K 
 
 .Accession 85998 Cto 
 
CHAPTERS ON PLANT LIFE 
 
 BY 
 
 SOPHIE BLEDSOE HERRICK 
 
 illustrate* 
 
 NEW YORK : CINCINNATI : CHICAGO 
 
 AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY 
 
BIOLOGY 
 LIBRARY 
 
 Copyright, 1885, oy HARPER & BROTHERS. 
 
 MERRICK'S PL. L. 
 B-P 8 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. PAGE 
 INTRODUCTORY 9 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 A FLOWERLESS FLOUR GARDEN 13 
 
 CHAPTER in. 
 THE FAIRY FUNGI 28 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 ODD FISH IN THE VEGETABLE WORLD 43 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 LICHENS 57 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 PLANTS AND ANIMALS THEIR DIFFERENCE 71 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 THE THIRSTY FLOWERS 84 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 PLANTS CAUGHT NAPPING . . 95 
 
 85998 
 
4 Contents. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. PAGE 
 
 LIVERWORTS .............. .... 107 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 MOSSES .................... 12 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 FERNS .................... 132 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 FLOWERS IN FANCY DRESS ............ 142 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 "PlCCIOLA" .................. 157 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 CLIMBING PLANTS ................ 11% 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 VEGETABLE PITCHERS .............. 183 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 SOME QUEER TRAPS .......... ..... 193 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 FIG. PAGK 
 
 1. TOADSTOOLS ,15 
 
 2. YEAST PLANT 16 
 
 3. MOULD (Penicilliuni) 21 
 
 4. MOULD (Aspergittus) 24 
 
 5. MOULD (Mucor) 25 
 
 6. GRAPE FUNGUS 31 
 
 7. POTATO FUNGUS 34 
 
 8. LEAF MILDEW .35 
 
 9. RYE SMUT 37 
 
 10. MILDEW ON VIRGINIA CREEPER 39 
 
 11. SILK-WORM FUNGUS 41 
 
 12. FIRST-BERRY FISH 45 
 
 13. EEL-PLANT 48 
 
 14. COLONIES OF FIRST-BERRY FISH 51 
 
 15. VEGETABLE SHELL-FISH 53 
 
 16. " " 55 
 
 17. LICHEN MAGNIFIED 60 
 
 18. WOOLLY LICHEN 62 
 
 19. LICHEN 64 
 
 20. ENCRUSTING LICHEN 65 
 
 21. REINDEER LICHEN 67 
 
 22. ANIMAL SEAWEED (Plumularia) 72 
 
6 Illustrations. 
 
 FIO. PAGE 
 
 23. ANIMAL 73 
 
 24. VEGETABLE 74 
 
 25. WATER PLANT AND WATER ANIMAL 75 
 
 26. LIVERWORT MOUTH OR ROOM 79 
 
 27. PLANT MOUTH 80 
 
 28. CELLS 86 
 
 29. CORN STALK CUT ACROSS 88 
 
 30. PLANT MOUTHS 89 
 
 31. WATER-CARRYING TUBES (Side View of Corn-stalk Tubes) 91 
 
 32. CACTUS 93 
 
 33. LOCUST BRANCH AWAKE 97 
 
 34. LOCUST BRANCH ASLEEP , .... 98 
 
 35. SENSITIVE PLANT AWAKE 99 
 
 36. SENSITIVE PLANT ASLEEP 100 
 
 37. YELLOW AND COMMON WHITE CLOVER 103 
 
 38. THE PATH OF THE NOD 105 
 
 39. LEAP OF LIVERWORT 109 
 
 40. PART OF LEAF OF LIVERWORT, MAGNIFIED . . . . 110 
 
 41. LEAF OF LIVERWORT CUT THROUGH ONE ROOM AND FLOOR 111 
 
 42. SEED DISK 113 
 
 43. WHIP-CASE 115 
 
 44. CUPULE, OR NEST 118 
 
 45. Moss SPORE-CASES 123 
 
 46. YOUNG Moss PLANT 124 
 
 47. WHIP-CASE 126 
 
 48. OVULE-CASE . . , 127 
 
 49. SPHAGNUM ENLARGED 128 
 
 50. WHIP-CASE 129 
 
 51. SPHAGNUM-LEAF MAGNIFIED 130 
 
 52. YOUNG FERN 133 
 
 53. LEAF WITH SPORE-CASES ON BACK . 134 
 
Illustrations. 7 
 
 FIG. I'AOK 
 
 55. AIR-VESSELS OF FERN 138 
 
 56. LEAF OF FERN 139 
 
 57. LADY'S-SLIPPER 143 
 
 58. BUTTERFLY ORCHID 144 
 
 59. CLIMBING ORCHID 145 
 
 60. YOUNG PLANT GROWING ON FLOWER STEM 147 
 
 61. HONEY POUCH AND POLLEN PODS 151 
 
 62. PENCIL AND NEEDLE, WITH POLLEN 154 
 
 63. BUTTERFLY'S PROBOSCIS, WITH POLLEN 155 
 
 64. CORN AND MAGNIFIED ROOT 162 
 
 65. GERANIUM PISTIL 165 
 
 66. GERANIUM STAMEN AND POLLEN GRAINS 166 
 
 67. PISTIL OF HEART'S-EASE 170 
 
 68. THE BEAN. FIRST LEAVES m DIFFERENT STAGES . .174 
 
 69. MOVEMENT OF ROOT OF BLACK BEAN 175 
 
 70. MORNING-GLORIES 176 
 
 71. VIRGINA CREEPER 177 
 
 72. PADS THROUGH THE MICROSCOPE 178 
 
 73. DIAGRAM OF STRAIGHT AND CURVED STEMS 181 
 
 74. OPEN-MOUTHED PITCHER 184 
 
 75. PITCHER WITH OVERHANGING HOOD AND CLEAR WINDOWS 185 
 
 76. PITCHER-PLANT IN BLOOM 189 
 
 77. DARLINGTONIA CALIFORNICA 190 
 
 78. BLADDER-WORT 191 
 
 79. BLADDER WITH CAPTURED PREY 191 
 
 80. SUN-DEW PLANT 194 
 
 81. SUN-DEW LEAF MAGNIFIED, SHOWING TENTACLES . . . 196 
 
 82. LEAVES OF VENUS'S FLY-TRAP 201 
 
 83. AUSTRALIAN PITCHER-PLANT 203 
 
 84. BIRD TRAP . . 205 
 
CHAPTERS ON PLANT LIFE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 You have read enough Indian stories, I am 
 sure, to know how very different life among sav- 
 ages is from ours. An Indian brave, if he has no 
 family, is obliged to do all his own work. He 
 makes his tent, or wigwam, hunts for his food, 
 gathers sticks for his fire, cooks the animals he 
 has captured can live his simple life indepen- 
 dent of the work of any other man. If he has a 
 family, he only hunts, or fights for their protec- 
 tion, while the women weave the mats, make the 
 moccasins, cook, and even raise some poor, meagre 
 crops. This is what is called a division of labor : 
 not a very equal one in the case of the Indian. 
 
10 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 It is found that when one man does one kind 
 of work constantly, and another man another 
 kind, that they each gain so much skill that there 
 is a saving of time and labor. If each exchanges 
 with the other so much of the results of his labor 
 as they need, they are better off. As people get 
 more peaceful and wiser and more civilized, this 
 division goes on more and more. 
 
 Something like this civilizing may be seen in 
 the vegetable world as we go from the simpler 
 forms, of life to those that are higher. Every 
 plant is made up of one or more bodies called 
 cells. The plant of a single cell is like a sin- 
 gle Indian, and does its own work in growing 
 and eating and breathing. Finally it produces 
 more cells like itself. Small, simple plants, such 
 as we shall see among the fairy fungi and odd 
 fish, are either single savages, or savages in fam- 
 ilies or tribes, banded together for protection 
 and for ease' in living, but each one capable of 
 doing everything for itself if it has to. 
 
Introductory. 11 
 
 The higher plants, such as every field and gar- 
 den and wood afford, are like a great society, such 
 as we live in and make parts of. Each cell of 
 the thousands and thousands has its own work 
 to do for the whole society, and depends not 
 alone upon its own work, but in part upon the 
 work of a great many others. 
 
 If we were to try to study one of these plants 
 with its different kinds of cells, at first we would 
 be all puzzled and confused. Cells which were 
 originally alike have so changed in appearance 
 and work that we would learn very little. And 
 so the world did learn very little as long as it 
 tried to study in such a way. But of late years 
 people have learned to begin with the A B C's 
 of science, as well as of reading and writing. 
 When we begin to take things up in this way, 
 and arrange them in a sort of order, we find that 
 it is not an order of our inventing, but the order 
 in which God let them grow, way, way back 
 thousands and thousands of years ago, when the 
 
12 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 world was being gradually made. If God cre- 
 ated them slowly, one after another, the easiest 
 and simplest first, and then those that were less 
 simple afterwards, that is certainly a good rea- 
 son for studying them in this same order. 
 
 I want to begin at the simplest single cell-plant, 
 and try to make it clear to you how these little 
 creatures live and grow and multiply. There are 
 two great divisions in the plant world the fun- 
 gous plants and the green plants; and what is 
 true of the tiniest members of these two divisions 
 in regard to their breathing and eating, is true of 
 the greatest. The small fungous plants, like yeast 
 and mould and mildew, and the largest toadstools, 
 live on other living or dead creatures; the green 
 plants draw their food from the earth and air 
 and water. As the fungi are the simplest of all, 
 we will begin with them. 
 
A Flouoerless Flour Garden. 13 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 A FLOWERLES8 FLOUR GARDEN. 
 
 WE all know, in a general way, that nothing 
 grows unless it is alive, and yet who ever thinks 
 of bread dough as having life in it ? There nev- 
 er was a garden bed so full of living plants as 
 is the loaf when it is moulded into shape, and 
 ready to be put into the oven. If you have nev- 
 er watched the mixing of bread, I would advise 
 you to go and look at it the first chance you 
 have, for it is a very curious and entertaining bit 
 of gardening. The cook first prepares her seed, 
 which is the yeast. There are several ways of 
 planting common flower-seed, and so there are of 
 planting yeast. You may either soak the seed 
 to make them sprout quickly, or you may start 
 the little plants in a hot-bed ; or, again, you may 
 
14 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 buy your young seedlings, and transplant them 
 into your own garden plot. Just so you may 
 get your yeast seed ready to plant. The yeast 
 cake may be only melted in warm water, or it 
 may be set to start in a cup of water and flour 
 by the warm kitchen fire, or you may buy the 
 yeast already grown at the baker's. 
 
 When the seed or seedlings are ready, the gar- 
 den plot is prepared. The cook heaps up in her 
 bread bowl quarts of snowy flour. Into this 
 heap, after making a hole, she pours her pre- 
 pared yeast. Working the bread is only an- 
 other name for the careful scattering of the seed 
 through all the dough, that it may spring up 
 and grow, and fill the whole mass with the tiny 
 plants. 
 
 The yeast plant is not a common kind of plant, 
 but belongs to the same class as mushrooms and 
 toadstools (Fig. 1), and the fuzzy, cottony growth 
 that we call mould. There are two kinds of 
 plants that we may find almost anywhere in the 
 
A Flowerless Flour Garden. 
 
 15 
 
 FIG. 1. TOADSTOOLS. 
 
 fields and woods, and even in the city yards the 
 fungi and the green plants. The yeast plant is 
 one of the fungi. These are very different in 
 most respects from the green plants: they can 
 live and grow and thrive in darkness; they do 
 
16 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 not have either leaves or flowers, and they usual- 
 ly spring up and die very quickly. The greatest 
 real difference between the two kinds is, how- 
 ever, that the fungi live on food that has been 
 alive before on plants or animals or decaying 
 matter while the green plants live on what they 
 get out of the earth, and the air, and the water. 
 The simplest of all the fungi is the yeast plant. 
 It begins its life as a tiny egg- 
 shaped bag, or sac (Fig. 2, a). 
 This cell, as it is called, is 
 filled with a very curious jel- 
 ly, perhaps the most wonder- 
 ful thing in all the w r orld. It 
 is found in everything that 
 lives and grows. By its help 
 the little yeast plant can take the flour and wa- 
 ter, and can change it so that while the paste is 
 used up and disappears, the cells grow larger 
 and sprout out buds. You have particles of this 
 jelly, or protoplasm, lining your mouth and ston> 
 
 FIG. 2. YEAST PLANT. 
 
 (TorulcB.} 
 
 a, Single cells ; &, grow- 
 ing plants. 
 
A Flowerless Flour Garden. 17 
 
 ach, and the food you eat is changed into flesh 
 and blood and bones by this wonder-working 
 magician. In the figures, the grainy substance is 
 the protoplasm. 
 
 This jelly all seems to be pretty much alike, no 
 matter in what plant or animal you find it; but 
 there is some marvellous difference somewhere 
 a difference that science has never reached. The 
 yeast cell takes in certain food, and grows, but it 
 never makes anything but other or larger yeast 
 cells. The food you eat and digest makes just 
 yon; more of you, perhaps, but still you, your- 
 self, and nobody else. 
 
 Like all living things, the tiny yeast cell must 
 both eat and breathe, or it will die. It feeds, not 
 by opening its mouth and taking in its food, but 
 by lying bathed in it, and soaking it up through 
 its skin. When the cook dissolves her yeast 
 cake, and puts it into the mixture of flour and 
 water we call dough, she is putting the little 
 plant into its food bath. The cells which have 
 
18 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 been so long in prison, shut up in the darkness 
 and cold of the dried yeast, begin to look alive, 
 and stretch themselves, and enjoy their liberty. 
 They take kindly to their food right away, and 
 begin helping themselves to what they find about 
 them. They do not merely soak up the flour 
 and water in which they are plunged, but they 
 manage to extract from the compound just what 
 they need to make them grow. 
 
 The cells must not only feed in order to live, 
 but they must breathe, they must somehow get 
 oxygen, which is the gas that our breathing 
 takes out of the air. And this they extract, as 
 a miner does iron, by separating it from its ore. 
 There is a certain amount of sugar in wheat, 
 which gives to good bread and to cracked wheat 
 their delicate sweetness of flavor. Sugar is made 
 up of a number of different substances, which the 
 yeast cell has the power of separating. It takes 
 the oxygen for its own use, and leaves behind 
 the other things that make up the sugar. The 
 
A Flowerless Flour Garden. 19 
 
 change that goes on in the flour and water dough 
 under the influence of the growing yeast plant is 
 called fermenting. 
 
 Feeding and breathing in this way, by taking 
 what it needs from the flour, the cell grows. 
 When it has reached its mature size, it rests qui- 
 etly for a while, as if it were gathering strength 
 for the effort, and then it sen(Js out a little bud, 
 which grows like the parent cell, until another 
 bud sprouts from the end of the new sac. When 
 this is grown, it is very unlike our notion of a 
 plant; it is really nothing more than a little 
 chain of sacs growing end to end. As soon as 
 the little plant has exhausted all the sugar and 
 food substance of the flour, it stops growing, the 
 cells separate and remain quite still. 
 
 There is just one time in the growth of the 
 plant when the dough is right for baking. Be- 
 fore it has grown enough, the bubbles through 
 the dough are too few or too small, and the 
 bread, if baked at this stage, would be heavy. 
 
20 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 These bubbles are the carbonic acid gas left be- 
 hind when the oxygen has been taken out of the 
 sugar, and there must be plenty of them to make 
 the bread light. If the bread is left too long to 
 rise, the cells get more than their share of the 
 wheat-sugar, and the bread is sour. Just at the 
 right stage, which every good bread -maker can 
 tell by experience, a thorough baking will de- 
 destroy the alcohol which is one of the things 
 left behind while the yeast is growing and the 
 bread will be both sweet and light. 
 
 When the yeast plant is sowed on the top of 
 the flour and water, instead of being buried in 
 it, all this is very different. The plant takes its 
 food from the paste, but it does not need the 
 sugar to supply it with oxygen, so it lets that 
 alone. It can get its oxygen in a much simpler 
 way, right from the air, as we do, and does not 
 need to go through the labor of smelting it out 
 of the sugar. The raising of our bread by yeast 
 is entirely due to the efforts of the tiny cells to 
 
A Flowerless Flour Garden. 21 
 
 get a breath of air when we have smothered 
 them up in the dough. 
 
 There are other plants besides the yeast plant 
 that act in the same way. Have you never 
 heard your mother say, when she opened a jar 
 
 FIG. 3. MOULD. 
 (Penicillium.) 
 
 of preserves, "These are all right, I know, for 
 they are covered with mould ?" Mould is a 
 good deal like yeast in some things; if the germ 
 cell, or spore, falls upon the top of the sweet- 
 
22 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 meats, it can get plenty of oxygen from the air, 
 and so lets the sugar alone. But if it is nearly 
 drowned in the sirup, it will get its oxygen 
 somehow, and so the sugar has to be sacrificed, 
 and the preserves are left to spoil. What else 
 could you expect of such little mischief-makers 
 if you shut them up with the sweetmeats? 
 
 The yeast plant is so very, very small that you 
 cannot see it except with a very fine magnifying 
 glass. But there are other plants like it which 
 are large enough to be seen with a small and not 
 a costly microscope.* These are what we call 
 moulds. If you want to study moulds, nothing 
 
 * There is a little microscope which can be gotten from James 
 W. Queen, 924 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, called the Child's Mi- 
 croscope, No. 3055, price $3 50, with three lenses. It is in a small 
 walnut box, has a little mirror, stand, two dissecting needles, box 
 for live insects, etc. , a pair of forceps, watch glass, and plain slides. 
 It magnifies about thirty-three diameters (nearly 1000 times in area), 
 and gives a good clear image, besides having the advantage of be- 
 ing an excellent pocket glass, even if you should buy a more costly 
 instrument hereafter. 
 
A Flowerless Flour Garden. 23 
 
 is easier than to prepare them. Mix a spoonful 
 of flour with cold water, and spread the paste 
 over the bottom of a plate or saucer. In a few 
 days it will be covered all over. If you put it 
 in a damp and dark place, the mould will sprout 
 sooner. You might put away a piece of bread 
 at the same time, and you will find it covered 
 with a growth too. 
 
 Take a bit of this paste on the blade of a 
 knife, and examine it carefully. You will see 
 among the cottony fibres a number of little up- 
 right stems with black or white or yellow heads, 
 which give the mould a speckled look. Under 
 the microscope you see a perfect jungle of growth 
 a tangle of threads, which look like spun 
 glass, running here and there and everywhere. 
 From these, which serve as roots to the mould, 
 the stems spring up, bearing, instead of leaves 
 or flowers, tiny glistening toadstools that look 
 as if they were made out of a pearl ; or some- 
 times the heads are like strings of little pearls 
 
24 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 (Fig. 3), or at others they are rosettes of such 
 strings (Fig. 4, a). The black and sage-green 
 colors come later, and are the fruit or seed -bear- 
 ing portion of the plant (Fig. 4, &). 
 
 FIG. 4. MOULD. 
 
 (Aspergillm.} 
 a, Rosette Heads ; &, Fruit. 
 
 On my saucer of paste I found in one place a 
 plantation of delicate yellow fungi. The stems 
 came up thick, with the little round fruit at the 
 end of each, looking as if the whole thing was 
 carved out of amber. In another place, over the 
 yawning caverns made by the cracks in the paste, 
 
A Flowerless Flour Garden. 
 
 25 
 
 there were delicate forms like grasses in seed, all 
 looking like spun glass. The largest kind of 
 common mould, which you may see in Fig. 5, is 
 not so beautiful as these I have just described, 
 but it shows very well the way the fungi grow 
 
 FIG. 5. MOULD. 
 
 (Muc&r.) 
 a, Stalk ; 6, same opened ; c, outer skin broken, and spores scattering. 
 
 and form their seed, and then sow themselves. 
 This plant is easily seen with the naked eye, 
 but looked at through the Child's Microscope, 
 you see a great deal more. The stalks look as 
 they do in Fig. 5, a. If you are so fortunate as 
 
26 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 to have a large microscope, and watch them from 
 day to day, you will see them look as they do in 
 Fig. 5, b, and finally, when the outer skin breaks, 
 like <?, in the same illustration. 
 
 A single spoonful of flour will give you this 
 wonderful garden, with its crop of yeast plant, if 
 you sow the seed ; or, if you trust to luck, its har- 
 vest of chance -sown mould. The air is full of 
 these spores of the mould plants, and wherever 
 they find a place they will take possession of it, 
 and grow up without planting or cultivating, as 
 weeds do. You can be certain of your yeast 
 crop, because you have sowed it ; but you must 
 take your chances with the mould. You are al- 
 most sure, however, to find in any saucer of paste 
 the different kinds described and pictured in 
 Figs. 3, 4, and 5. 
 
 The toadstool, whose picture (Fig. 1) is the 
 first of all the fungi given here, is much larger 
 than the mould, but almost as simple. It is 
 made up of millions upon millions of little cells 
 
A Flowerless Flour Ga/rden. 37 
 
 in strings or in flat plates, most of them like each 
 other. This is very different from the cells in the 
 higher kinds of plants ; they have different kinds 
 of cells for different purposes, as we shall see 
 after a while. 
 
 It is worth while sometimes to get away from 
 the every-day world, and learn the wonders that 
 are to be found within the fairy ring to which 
 the microscope admits us. 
 
Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 THE FAIRY FUNGI. 
 
 THE hill - sides of the southern part of France 
 are covered with vineyards, where the luscious 
 grapes round out under the late summer sun- 
 shine into globes of delicious sweetness. When 
 the grapes are ripe, the peasants men, women, 
 and children may be seen gayly trooping to 
 the vineyards to pick them for wine. In the 
 famous Steinburger vineyard the pickers are all 
 girls about eighteen years old. Each girl has a 
 row to pick, and they begin together, and move 
 forward as steadily and evenly as a regiment of 
 soldiers. With their gay petticoats looped up so 
 that they may not brush off the ripe grapes, and 
 their bright stockings and mittens, they make a 
 very pretty picture moving along between the 
 
The Fairy Fungi. 29 
 
 rows, snipping the ripe grapes, and letting them 
 drop into their baskets. When the baskets are 
 full they are emptied into a tub, which the men 
 lift by leathern straps and carry to the roadside 
 press. The juice which comes spurting out of 
 the press is placed in vats or barrels, and there 
 left to ferment, which changes the juice, or must, 
 into wine. When the cook wants her bread to 
 ferment, or rise, she plants it with yeast ; but the 
 wine has nothing planted in it, and yet it ferments. 
 Pasteur, the great French chemist, made up his 
 mind to find why this was. He was convinced 
 from all his studies in fermentation that the rea- 
 son would be found in some little plant which 
 was growing in the juice and helping itself to 
 whatever it needed to eat or to breathe. He set 
 to work to find out where the plants came from 
 which turned the grape juice into wine. All his 
 experiments are so fully and clearly explained 
 that any one who is willing to take the pains 
 can try them for himself. 
 
30 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 He found that there was no fungus growing 
 inside the little closed bag (which we call skin) 
 in which the pulp, seed, and juice of the grape 
 are sealed up. There is no opening anywhere in 
 a sound grape through which spores (which are 
 the fungus seed) could enter. But he found on 
 the skin of the grape, and thickly over the stem, 
 little plants, something like yeast and something 
 like mould; these make up in part what is 
 called the bloom of the grape. He put some 
 water, with these plants mixed through it, into 
 a tightly sealed bottle, and into another he put 
 the pure juice of the grapes which had none of 
 the little plants through it, and then waited to 
 see what would happen. In a few days the wa- 
 ter was all yeasty, and the grape juice was un- 
 changed (Fig. 6). He tried this same thing over 
 and over and over again, and in various ways, 
 to be sure that he was right. He thus found 
 that the little magician that turns the juice into 
 wine is always waiting at the door of the sealed 
 
FIG. 6. GRAPE FUNGUS. 
 
The Fairy Fungi. 33 
 
 chamber, ready to work its miracle as soon as it 
 can reach the juice. 
 
 The case is very different with beer. Pasteur 
 gave a great deal of time and attention to finding 
 out why so many millions of gallons of beer were 
 every year spoiled in the making. The brewers 
 could not tell why. They prepared their wort 
 in just the same way, and planted just the same 
 amount of yeast into the good beer as they did 
 in what turned out to be bad. He brought that 
 wonderful microscope of his to bear upon the 
 subject. He found that whenever the wort was 
 planted with yeast which had certain curious 
 little glassy rods mixed through it, the beer 
 turned sour. The brewer, when he put such 
 yeast as this into his wort, was planting, along 
 with the seeds of the yeast plant, seeds of a 
 troublesome weed. The sour beer was really 
 only a very queer kind of a liquid garden, grow- 
 ing more weeds than useful plants. 
 
 Vinegar is another thing made by these little 
 
34 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 fairy fungi. The cider out of which it is made 
 is set away in a cask to ferment. The spores 
 that work the change in this case are floating 
 
 FIG. 7. POTATO FUNGUS. 
 (Botrytis infestans.) 
 
 in the air, and manage somehow to get into the 
 open cask. Did you ever notice the flakes of 
 muddy - looking substance at the bottom of a 
 vinegar cruet? That i$ the mother, the little 
 plant that has made the cider into vinegar. 
 
Tfie Fairy Fungi. 
 
 35 
 
 These are some of the useful things that are 
 done by the fungi, and they are certainly very 
 valuable services. We owe to them our bread 
 and wine and beer and vinegar. But they are 
 not always benevolent fairies by any means. 
 
 FIG. 8. LEAF MILDEW. 
 
 Sometimes we are inclined to think that they 
 are at the bottom of pretty much all the mischief 
 in the world. If they were not sailing about in 
 every breath of wind, getting into all sorts of 
 places where they are not wanted, we probably 
 
3Q (J/ia/pters on Plant Life. 
 
 would never have any chills and fever or diph- 
 theria, and the yellow fever would not sweep off 
 its thousands and tens of thousands. If these 
 little floating spores did not get into every crack 
 and cranny, wounds would not fester, damp linen 
 would not mildew, preserves and pickles would 
 not mould, milk would not sour, nothing would 
 spoil or ferment or decay. There is an old prov- 
 erb that " the mother of mischief is no bigger 
 than a midge's wing." I sometimes wonder if 
 the old-time people that made the proverbs did 
 not know something of these tiny mischiefs that 
 only seem to be waiting the chance to work their 
 naughty will. 
 
 There is one case where this change takes 
 place which you have probably often seen. 
 When I was a child I used to be very fond of 
 getting from the woods close to the house, or 
 from the wood - pile, bits of shining wood and 
 bark, which we called " fox fire." The wood was 
 always old and decaying, and we thought it was 
 
The Fairy Fungi. 
 
 37 
 
 shining because it was dying. But really the 
 perishing wood was covered all over with tiny 
 mushrooms, which shone with a light something 
 like the glimmer of a fire-fly. In some countries 
 this brightness is very wonder- 
 ful. In Australia people have 
 been able to read by the light 
 of a shining stump overgrown 
 with luminous fungi. 
 
 Some of the fungi have not 
 even the manners to wait until 
 their victims are dead. They 
 take possession of living plants and animals, and 
 never rest until they have destroyed them. The 
 disease among potatoes called the potato-blight 
 (Fig. 7), of which we hear so much, is caused by 
 the growth of a little fungous plant in the 
 mouths, or breathing holes, on the skin of the 
 potato, and the blight and mildew (Fig. 8) and 
 smut of wheat and corn and rye (Fig. 9) are all 
 due to the same cause. The mouldy look upon 
 
 FIG. 9. RYE SMTTT. 
 (Cordyceps.) 
 
38 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 vine leaves is nothing else. I put a leaf of Vir- 
 ginia creeper, which looked whitish and ugly, 
 under the microscope one day, and found the 
 whole surface covered with a net- work of silvery 
 threads, with a wonderful fruit growing upon it. 
 The fruits looked like peeled oranges surrounded 
 with threads of spun sugar, or occasionally like a 
 gigantic blackberry sparkling with crystals. This 
 was only a common mildew, but under the mag- 
 nifier it seemed a wonderful garden, growing con- 
 serves and fairy fruits, and was beautiful beyond 
 description (Fig. 10). 
 
 The silk -worm is attacked by a fungous plant 
 (Fig. 11). It takes possession of the worm just 
 before it begins to spin its cocoon, and some years 
 ago it destroyed such multitudes that the French 
 silk trade was seriously threatened. The micro- 
 scope was again brought into use, and the cause 
 of the trouble discovered, and the cure effected. 
 
 The untiring Pasteur studied up this and other 
 diseases of the silk- worm as he did those of wine 
 
FIG. 10. MILDEW ON VIRGINIA CREEPER. 
 
 (Erysiphe.) 
 
The Fairy Fungi. 
 
 41 
 
 and beer, and helped the silk-worm growers to 
 stamp out the disease when it appeared. It per- 
 haps seems a small thing for a man of genius like 
 
 FIG. 11. SELK-WOKM FUNGUS. 
 (Botrytis bassiano.) 
 
 Pasteur to give his whole life to studying these 
 little plants through the microscope, but never 
 was a life more helpfully and patriotically spent. 
 Hundreds of thousands of the French peasants 
 depended for daily food and shelter upon what 
 they earned in the wine and beer and silk trades, 
 and these trades Pasteur's work has saved from 
 
42 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 destruction or great loss. It has been said that 
 his work with the microscope has saved to 
 France more money than the awful French Rev- 
 olution cost her. 
 
Odd Fish in the Vegetable World. 43 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ODD FISH IN THE VEGETABLE WORLD. 
 
 I MUST begin by telling you that these " odd 
 fish " are very little fish indeed, so small that you 
 could not make out anything about them unless 
 you used a magnifying-glass. But if you do, you 
 will be rewarded by seeing some very wonderful 
 things. 
 
 Let us go out into the yard ; it does not make 
 much difference whether it is a great country 
 garden, with beds of vegetables edged with flow- 
 ers and threaded by pleasant walks, or a little, 
 narrow, paved, cooped -up city yard, we will be 
 pretty sure to find what we want. Every wa- 
 ter-butt and horse-trough, every little puddle left 
 by the rain (if it has stood long enough) is sure 
 to be swarming with one kind or another of these 
 
44 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 curious little creatures. If you have no such col- 
 lections of water, look, and perhaps you will find 
 in the shady corner of your yard a wet, slimy 
 green moss coating the bricks. This you will 
 find, if you examine it through your magnifying- 
 glass, to be made up of thousands and thousands 
 of little green cells. Each of these is one of 
 our odd fish coiled up and asleep. I call them 
 fish, though they are true plants, because they 
 live in the water, or very damp places where 
 there is enough water for them though it would 
 not be good swimming ground for larger plants 
 or animals and they go swimming about seek- 
 ing for food, every now and then settling down 
 to the bottom as if they were tired and wanted 
 to go to sleep. 
 
 One of the commonest of these it has a long 
 Latin name, which means "first-berry" -is also 
 one of the most interesting. The first time I 
 ever saw it I remember my astonishment. I took 
 about a teaspoonful of water out of a little stag- 
 
Odd Fish in the Vegetable World. 
 
 45 
 
 nant pool that the rain had left in the garden, 
 and poured it into the crystal of a watch. I put 
 it under my microscope and looked in. The lit- 
 tle round watery world under my eye was all 
 alive with busy creatures, dashing here and there 
 
 B 
 
 FlG. 12. FiRST-BERRY FlSH. 
 
 A, moving; dd, cilia; J5, still; (7, multiplying; Z), red snow-plant; 
 -E", baby berries swimming freely. 
 
 and. every where. Among other things I found 
 my queer little first-berry fish. He was long and 
 pear-shaped, and moved small end foremost. I 
 
46 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 could not see how he managed it, but I knew 
 where to look to find his swimmers (Fig. 12,^4). 
 Coming out from the two little peaks at the 
 small end there were, I knew, two fine threads 
 called cilia (d d) meaning eyelash, because of 
 their shape. With these he whipped through the 
 water, moving himself along just as you do with 
 your arms when you are swimming. For a while 
 I could not see the lashes, they were moving so 
 fast, but after a long time one of the funny little 
 fellows seemed to get tired, he " slowed up," and 
 then the eyelashes could be seen. You see in 
 the picture (Fig. 12, A) the berry -fish moving; 
 dd are his swimmers. At B he is coiled up at 
 rest. If you were to keep th^rn and look at them 
 every little while for several days as I did, you 
 would see a change taking place inside the still 
 cell, JB. The whole inner part divides in two, 
 then each of these halves divide again, and so 
 on till the inside jelly is divided up into smaller 
 parts ; each one of these parts rounds up till the 
 
Odd Fish in the Vegetable World. 47 
 
 whole inside of the berry looks like a cluster of 
 small berries (Fig. 12, C) enclosed in the outer 
 shell. Finally, the old shell softens and melts 
 away, and then instead of one mother berry you 
 have a whole flock of baby berries that scatter 
 themselves, and soon go lashing about merrily 
 through the water like fish again. At D, in the 
 same figure, you may see another member of the 
 family of berry-fish, only he lives in the snow in 
 Greenland and other far north countries. In- 
 stead of being green, this snow-plant is red, and 
 the millions of them scattered through the snow 
 give to it a bright red color. I think you must 
 have read something of the wonderful red snow 
 in the Arctic regions, and now you know why 
 it is so. 
 
 In the same little spoonful of water you may 
 be so fortunate as to find another moving thing 
 that looks like an eel as it goes wriggling about 
 among the other fish. These are really stiff 
 spirals, like a furniture spring, only longer and 
 
48 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 narrower. They move in several different ways ; 
 
 in some one end swings backward and forward 
 
 like the pendulum of 
 a clock, others wriggle. 
 The movement that 
 seems to be wriggling 
 is really the turning 
 round and round of 
 the spiral, just as a 
 spinning-top does. Try 
 the movement with a 
 corkscrew held in 
 place at tip and han- 
 dle and quickly spun 
 around, and you will 
 see for yourself (Fig. 
 13). Some of the 
 forms here (Fig. 1 3, #) 
 are the little mischief- 
 K ,, makers of which I was 
 
 A, D, vibrios ; B, 0, E, G, spirillums ; 
 
 IT, bacteria. telling you in the last 
 
Odd Fish in the 
 
 chapter, which cause meat to decay and spoil 
 bacteria they are called. A great many of them 
 together, turning round in this way, naturally get 
 tangled up into lumps. When one of these is 
 placed on a sheet of paper, the separate little 
 wrigglers often form a star-shaped figure which 
 is very pretty. 
 
 If you have ever spent any time at the sea- 
 shore, you must have seen queer lumps of jelly 
 in the sand, and been told, if you were interested 
 enough to ask, that they were jelly-fish. The 
 vegetable world has its jelly-fish too. Some- 
 times floating on ponds, sometimes on damp or 
 mossy ground, lumps of a clearish jelly will be 
 found, very curious to look at and very myste- 
 rious in their coming. They are really a kind of 
 water-plant. All through the mass are rows of 
 round cells, like strings of beads, coiled up in 
 great masses, and held together by the jelly that 
 oozes out of them. A new colony is formed by 
 
 the jelly melting up enough to let the strings 
 
 4 
 
50 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 of cells get free; they begin wriggling, and at last 
 get oat of the jelly prison, grow and spread, and 
 finally make a new colony like the one they came 
 from. Sometimes a quantity of the dried -out 
 jelly will be lying on a brick walk or some such 
 place. No one would notice it in this state. 
 With the first rain, however, the cells all swell 
 up, and a lump of jelly appears as if by magic. 
 These are sometimes called "fallen stars" by 
 country people, who think they must have fallen 
 from the sky. 
 
 Your watch-glass pond may perhaps contain 
 another form which is interesting to watch with- 
 out a magnify ing-glass, but far more interesting 
 with one. It looks to the naked eye like a little 
 globe, not so large as a pin's head, of nearly clear 
 green glass, with tiny specks of a deeper green 
 through it. It goes rolling over and over and 
 around in the water, not very fast, but pretty 
 much all the time. Now let us put him under 
 the microscope and see what he looks like. We 
 
Odd Fish in the Vegetable World. 51 
 
 see globes of a deep green enclosed in a lacy net- 
 work of a beautiful pale green color (Fig. 14,^1), 
 B shows this net -work still more magnified. 
 You can see without my telling you that the 
 net-work is made up of hundreds and hundreds 
 of our little berry-fish fastened together by clear 
 bands of a jelly-like material. The smaller and 
 greener balls within the net are new colonies 
 growing up to full size. When this happens, the 
 outer globe bursts and lets the inner globes free, 
 and so it goes on, each globe having globes with- 
 in it like a Chinese ball puzzle. 
 
 B 
 
 FIG. 14. 
 A, colonies of first-berry fish ; B, part of the same magnified. 
 
52 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 I wish I could give you a peep through my 
 large microscope at the last kind of fish I am 
 going to show you. These are a sort of vegeta- 
 ble shell-fish, and are found in all kinds of water- 
 salt, fresh, and brackish. In the mountain brooks 
 near West Point they grow in such multitudes 
 that the beds of the streams are covered about 
 one-quarter of an inch with them. Every stone 
 and stick and twig is glistening with them. In 
 other places they have been found in such quan- 
 tities that the beds of rivers and the mouths of 
 harbors have been choked up with them. The 
 numbers you may get some idea of when I tell 
 you that it takes sixteen millions of some kinds 
 to fill a box one inch square, and these are a 
 large kind. 
 
 Nothing in nature is more wonderful and 
 beautiful, when magnified, than these shells. 
 They are of the purest glass, of every imaginable 
 shape, ornamented with the most delicate pat- 
 terns. No drawing can give you an idea of 
 
Odd Fish in the Vegetable World. 
 
 53 
 
 FIG. 15. VEGETABLE SHELL-FISH. 
 
 A y on stem ; B, fastened by corners : a, top view ; &, 2, shell inside the 
 band ; (7, top of new box ; D, side view of box. 
 
 their great beauty. Here are a few of the shells. 
 Some of them grow on stems (Fig. 15, A) ; some 
 are attached together by their corners and live 
 in long chains (^) ; others are free. They are of 
 
54 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 all sorts of queer shapes. Like the " first-berry," 
 they move about, but their movements are a 
 curious jerking advance and retreat, which seems 
 to have no sense in it. 
 
 Now look at Fig. 15, 0. You see it looks some- 
 thing like a three-cornered box, C being the top 
 and D the side view; the upper shell is fitted 
 over the lower, just as the lid of a pill- box fits 
 over the lower part. Inside is the jelly-like body 
 of the plant. Like others of this family, the 
 plant grows by the enlarging of living cells, 
 which then divide up into two. This is easy 
 enough in soft cells, but of course if it enlarged 
 as we saw it do in the "first-berry," the beau- 
 tiful glass shell would be broken to pieces. 
 Now pay close attention while I try to explain 
 how these curious little things manage to grow, 
 and save their shells too. The jelly inside gets 
 bigger; that pushes the lid up and partly off the 
 bottom of the box. To keep any of the jelly 
 from being unprotected, a band like a flat brace- 
 
Odd Fish in the Vegetable World. 
 
 55 
 
 let of glass covers the edges, and grows wider as 
 is needed. All this has been very carefully 
 watched under the microscope. The jelly inside 
 divides into two parts, and then one part of the 
 jelly takes the old lid, and the other the old 
 bottom for new lids, and inside the band each 
 builds itself half a new shell (Fig. 15,^, U) m So 
 
 FIG. 16. VEGETABLE SHELL-FISH. 
 
 A, B, C, successive stages in the formation of seed shell ; 
 
 a, old shells ; 6, seed shells. 
 
 two new shell -fish are made out of one; when 
 this is done the band falls off, whole or in pieces, 
 and leaves them each ready to begin this over 
 again. 
 
 Sometimes two of the shells come near to each 
 
56 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 other, and surround themselves with a kind of 
 jelly (Fig. 16, A). After a while in the midst of 
 this jelly appears a curious-looking shell (Fig. 16) 
 entirely different from the ones it comes from. 
 This is the seed of new shell-fish plants, like those 
 which produced it (Fig. 16, D, shells a a, seed 
 shell, V). 
 
 In the ages, long ago, when the world was 
 making, these little plants had a good time of it. 
 They grew in such quantities that their shells 
 have made great beds of earth. The city of 
 Richmond, in Virginia, is built upon such a bed, 
 and millions upon millions of them can be found 
 in a handful of the common earth. 
 
Lichens. 5? 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 LICHENS. 
 
 IT is not uncommon to find among animals a 
 curious kind of house -keeping arrangement, by 
 which they live together, each one helping to 
 keep up the establishment, and all having equal 
 rights. Oftener, however, we find one animal 
 quietly settling down upon another, expecting to 
 be supported in idleness. This is not only true 
 of animals ; it is equally true of plants. Some of 
 the very smallest of them are as proud and inde- 
 pendent as the largest ; they busy themselves all 
 day extracting their food out of the earth and 
 air, earning their own living in a most praise- 
 worthy way, and ready to lend a helping hand 
 to others. The "dead-beats" of the vegetable 
 world are most commonly found among the lower 
 classes the fungi. 
 
 
58 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 You remember, in studying the fungi we found 
 that one thing the principal thing which mark- 
 ed their difference from the green plants was that 
 they are obliged to feed on what has been some 
 time a living substance, whether vegetable or 
 animal. The yeast-plant and moulds and mush- 
 rooms feed upon dead material, that which is no 
 longer alive ; but there are other fungi that prey 
 upon living things some of these we have al- 
 ready studied (Figs. 6, 7, 11) in the chapter on 
 the fairy fungi such as the grape fungus, the 
 potato blight, and the silk- worm fungus. These 
 forms of fungus life seem in most cases to be a 
 kind of disease. But there are still other forms 
 which are even more curious. 
 
 Have you not, hundreds of times, in the woods 
 noticed how old tree trunks and twigs, particu- 
 larly dead ones, were covered with a curious 
 crust, sometimes gray and sometimes greenish in 
 hue ? Occasionally you have found them bright 
 orange, and again holding up coral-red cups to 
 
Lichens. 59 
 
 the sun and rain. These are not mosses, as you 
 often hear them called. In fact, they have no 
 correct ordinary name, and so get their botanical 
 name of lichens oftener than any other. 
 
 One of the most singular things in the study 
 of all plants are these same plants, and it took a 
 great many long years of study to find out their 
 ways. A lichen is really a peculiar kind of a fun- 
 gus, growing on and sucking its nourishment out 
 of a little green water-plant, which manages to N 
 support both itself and its " dead-beat " neighbor. 
 For a long time the little green cells that flour- 
 ished so bravely in the clutch of the lazy giant 
 of a fungus were thought to be the fruit of the 
 fungus. After long studying and examining, 
 some keen -sigh ted botanist saw that the green 
 cells were no more nor less than our little " first- 
 berry," being eaten out of house and home by 
 his lazy visitor. He collected the green cells of 
 the plant, and, to test the matter, he sowed them, 
 and watched what became of them; they grew 
 
60 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 apace, and when they came to move about he 
 found that he was not mistaken : they were, sure 
 enough, the " first-berry." 
 
 FIG. 17. LICHEN MAGNIFIED. 
 
 a, fungus ; 6, host. 
 
 You see in Fig. 17 how the twining arms of 
 the lichen, a, embrace the "first-berry," b, and 
 push their way into the very heart of the cell to 
 take away its food. For some reason it does not 
 overpower and kill its little host possibly it 
 may in some unknown way pay board in serv- 
 ices, but nobody has ever found it out if such 
 is the case though it is a fact that some of the 
 
Lichens. 61 
 
 tiny plants so preyed upon, instead of being hin- 
 dered in their growth, seem to be rather stimu- 
 lated by the demand upon them. 
 
 All these lower forms of life, including the 
 fungi, odd fish, and lichens, are called by a Latin 
 name meaning that the plant is all leafy. They 
 have no distinct stems and roots, they all seem to 
 be just something like a leaf. In lichens this 
 leafy crust is called a thallus it has no correct 
 common name. 
 
 The thallus creeps on chips of decaying wood ? 
 bark, or small branches, diving down into the 
 cells of the green plant below to feed itself, and 
 sending up into the air the little cup or heads, 
 which are its fruit. Some of the gray, woolly 
 lichens that cover twigs growing near the sea- 
 shore, or down in mossy dells, have what seem 
 like stems ; but they are not true stems, the cells 
 inside are different from stem cells (Fig. 1 8) and 
 like those of the leaves. We have to learn, in 
 studying nature, "not to judge according to ap- 
 
62 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 FIG. 18. WOOLLY LICHEN. 
 
 (Usnea barbata.) 
 
 pearance, but to judge righteous judgment." It 
 is by the lives of these little creatures, not by 
 
Lichens. 63 
 
 their mere outward appearance, that we know 
 their real character. 
 
 Lichens are good things to study in winter, for 
 you can find them when other plants are having 
 their long sleep. They grow everywhere, and on 
 pretty much everything that has crevices in which 
 their host can find moisture. 
 
 The " first-berry " is by no means the only one 
 of the " odd fish " which are hosts to the lichens. 
 The vegetable jelly-fish, the red snow-plant, and 
 others answer the same purpose. But whatever 
 the host is, you cannot help feeling that he is 
 ill-used. Sometimes one is almost smothered 
 in the embrace of his ungrateful visitor and 
 guest; sometimes another is fairly sucked diy 
 by these sponges; but the plucky little things 
 manage to live somehow and bear the burden 
 of life. 
 
 Some of the lichens contradict the old saying 
 that " beggars must not be choosers," for they 
 will not live on any host but a particular one 
 
64 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 which suits them. Others are not so particular, 
 and will take to any one which will afford them 
 nourishment. 
 
 Occasionally, among the hard dry growths that 
 are the commonest forms of lichens, we find a 
 kind that is like cold, clammy flesh. It grows in 
 cushion-like masses. In these forms the poor 
 little host is scattered in bunches through the 
 
 FIG. 19. 
 
 a, the fungus ; &, the host ; c, the spore cup from which the spores are 
 
 escaping ; d, spores. 
 
 (Cdllema.) 
 
Lichens. 
 
 65 
 
 fleshy mass, or runs through it like strings of 
 glistening beads (Fig. 19, 5). 
 
 Lichens, like some plants higher in the scale 
 of life, grow from spores. These produce new 
 plants as seed do, but they are not seed. Seed, 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 FIG. 30. ENCRUSTING LICHEN. 
 (Ptirmelia.) 
 
 as you will see when we come to them, are always 
 made by the partnership of two entirely different 
 cells combining together. Spores are more like 
 a little bud growing out of the plant, and when 
 it is ripe, getting loose from the place where it 
 
 5 
 
66 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 grew, and being scattered on the ground by the 
 wind or the rain. They grow usually in some 
 sort of cup, which holds them safely till they are 
 ripe and free (Figs. 19 and 20). 
 
 It would not seem that such sturdy little beg- 
 gars and persistent sponges would be of much 
 use in such a busy world as this ; and yet if it 
 were not for them a large part of the world 
 would be without inhabitants. All Lapland, you 
 know, is inhabited by people whose living de- 
 pends on the reindeer. In our climate we can 
 scarcely imagine how people could depend so upon 
 any one kind of animal. But the people there 
 have nothing else; they eat the flesh, and drink 
 the milk of the reindeer ; their clothes are made 
 from his skin, their tools are carved out of his ant- 
 lers ; his sinews supply thread, his bones, soaked in 
 oil, they burn for fuel. Living, he is his master's 
 horse and mule, carrying him and his belongings 
 from place to place. The Laplander's whole 
 mode of life depends upon these tiny little plants 
 
PIG. 21. REINDEER LICHEN, 
 (Cladonia.) 
 
Lichens. 69 
 
 (Fig. 21), for when the reindeer have devoured all 
 that is growing in one place, the Laplanders move 
 bag and baggage, where they can find some more. 
 
 In the short, hot summers the reindeer can get 
 the fresh shoots of certain trees, but in winter 
 there is nothing but the lichen under the snow. 
 Besides being the only food they can get to eat, 
 it seems to be necessary to them. When reindeer 
 are brought to temperate climates as a show, it is 
 found necessary to feed them on these lichens or 
 something of the kind, or they will not keep well 
 and hearty. As food the lichen has another ad- 
 vantage, that it takes a great while to digest, and 
 a meal will last for a long time, enabling the 
 reindeer to take long journeys over the frozen 
 snow-covered ground without a fresh meal. 
 
 There is one kind of lichen which grows in 
 great quantities in some parts of the far north 
 countries. This is called the tripe de roche, or 
 rock tripe, because it looks a little like tripe and 
 because it can be eaten by men. Arctic travel- 
 
70 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 lers, caught by the ice in these northern countries, 
 have been kept alive for weeks, when they had 
 no other food, by these lichens. It is one form 
 or other of these tiny plants, which we scarcely 
 even notice, that saves great regions of Arctic 
 country from being a desolate no-man's land from 
 end to end. 
 
Plants <md Animals Their Difference. 71 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 PLANTS AND ANIMALS THEIR DIFFERENCE. 
 
 IF the question were put to you suddenly, 
 " What is the difference between a plant and an 
 animal?" how do you think you would answer? 
 Stop a minute, and think. Do not be satisfied 
 with saying that a plant has leaves, and an ani- 
 mal has not. Look deeper, and answer more 
 thoughtfully. There are many plants which have 
 no leaves, nor roots, nor flowers ; this you know 
 very well, for the only plants we have examined 
 so far have had none of these things, and there 
 are some animals which seem to have all of 
 them, as you may see by looking at Figs. 22 
 and 22#. In some cases they are so much alike 
 (Figs. 23 and 24) that it has taken the most 
 careful study to decide whether they are plants 
 or animals. 
 
Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 FIG. 22. ANIMAL SEAWEED. 
 
 (Plumularia. ) 
 
 Look up into the 
 bright blue sky, and 
 then down at the solid 
 earth beneath your feet 
 you do not find any 
 difficulty in telling, 
 without taking a mo- 
 ment to think, which is 
 sky and which is earth ; 
 but if you are so happy 
 as to live in the wide 
 open country, or near 
 the sea, or on a lofty 
 hill, look off and off and 
 off until 
 
 you see 
 only the delicate blue haze like 
 smoke which divides the heavens 
 from the earth. You can often see 
 the same thing by looking from 
 the upper windows of a high house. 
 
 FIG. 22a. 
 (Plumularia.) 
 
Plants and Animals Their Difference. 73 
 
 You will find that many and many a time you 
 cannot tell which is earth and which is air. 
 
 Just so it is in the world of nature. You 
 may look at a group of cows standing under 
 
 FIG. 23. ANIMAL. 
 
 (Coral polyps.) 
 
 the trees, or watch the merry little grasshoppers 
 skipping about in the weeds, or catch a bee at 
 his early drink in a morning-glory bell, and you 
 would laugh if anybody asked you if you could 
 tell the animal from the plant. But get far 
 enough away from these common things, and 
 study the animals and plants that need your 
 microscope to see them, and you would find 
 things so much alike that you could not tell 
 
74 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 which was which. Many of these plants have 
 no roots nor leaves, no flowers nor seed, and 
 many of the animals have no heads nor legs, 
 
 FIG. 24. VEGETABLE. 
 
 (Meserribryanthemum. ) 
 
 no eyes, nor mouths, nor stomachs. In Fig. 25, 
 a is a plant, and b is an animal. Now how do 
 you suppose anybody knows this? People who 
 study these things do not guess they know. 
 
Plants and Animals Their Difference. 75 
 
 The real difference lies in what these tiny little 
 creatures do, not at all how they are formed. 
 
 About three -fourths of all the kinds of sea- 
 weed, for instance, are found to be animal not 
 one animal, but a colony; the other fourth are 
 vegetables. All these used to be considered veg- 
 etables ; so did the sponge, and the coral, and the 
 sea-anemones, and they are all now known to be 
 
 FIG. 25. WATER PLANT ANP WATER ANIMAL. 
 (Diatom.) (Foranimifer.) 
 
 animals. Every time you play the game of 
 "Twenty Questions" you have to think and 
 decide whether the particular thing you have 
 chosen is " animal, vegetable, or mineral." Have 
 you any notion what makes the real difference 
 between them? 
 
76 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 I imagine that, sooner or later, you will think 
 and say the difference is that animals can move 
 and plants cannot. That might have been a very 
 sensible conclusion if you had come to ifc before 
 you had studied anything about the curious odd 
 fish in the vegetable world. It is not correct, 
 you now know, for plants do move, some of them 
 very much as animals do; others, and the greater 
 number, in another way: which all seems very 
 wonderful, and which I want to talk over after a 
 while in the chapter on Climbing Plants. 
 
 What makes the real, deep-down difference is 
 this: Plants can live on mineral matters alone, 
 on earth and water and air, and these things 
 they can change into their own flesh and blood, 
 their stems and sap and fruit. Animals can 
 only live on what the plants have already 
 turned from dead into living material. We need 
 water that is a mineral and salt and air, which 
 are minerals too, if we are to keep alive and 
 well. But we cannot live on these things alone: 
 
Plants and Animals Their Difference. 77 
 
 we should soon die if we had no food ; and all 
 really nourishing food, all that keeps our blood 
 warm and makes us grow, has once been vegeta- 
 ble. Not one bird or fish or animal, not one 
 single human being, could ever have lived on 
 this earth, in the air or in the water, if the plants 
 had not come first, and prepared the earth for 
 us to live in. 
 
 These are " sure enough " fairies that are for- 
 ever working their wonders for us. The roots, 
 like elves, grope down in the earth, and gather 
 its treasures; the leaves stretch out into the air, 
 and gather its riches, and out of what they have 
 collected they weave the beautiful flowers, and 
 delicious fruits, and golden grain. 
 
 I should like to make very clear just the way 
 they do this ; it is very wonderful and beautiful 
 to study how they work their spells. First, the 
 root, as we shall see, armed with its little helmet, 
 bores its way down into the earth. If it finds no 
 water or damp earth it soon wilts and dies, but 
 
78 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 if it finds a wet place it begins to soak up moist- 
 ure. Besides the water, it sucks up all the parts 
 of the earth that are dissolved in the water. The 
 water it must have, and it will manage to live a 
 while on that alone, as many starving men have 
 done; but it cannot live so very long. Poor 
 ground means ground that has little or no plant 
 food in it. 
 
 You know, if you ever did any gardening 
 work, that you can stick a cutting of geranium 
 or begonia into pure sand that has no nourish- 
 ment at all in it, and that if you keep it well wa- 
 tered the cutting will strike out roots and bear 
 leaves. This is, in fact, the best way to start cut- 
 tings, for mould is a little apt to rot the stem, 
 but the sand preserves it. After a while the 
 baby plant is tired of doing nothing but sucking 
 water, and cries for some stronger food. Then 
 you must put it into rich earth, still giving it 
 plenty of water. The roots, like the baby's stom- 
 ach, will at first be satisfied with a very milk-and- 
 
Plants and Animals Their Difference. 79 
 
 watery diet, but after a while it must have a 
 strengthening soup. 
 
 The roots bring the plant a good deal, but the 
 leaves are the principal feeders. Every leaf and 
 tem is supplied with millions of little mouths, 
 which are usually open, breathing in the air and 
 breathing out moisture and the gases it cannot 
 
 FIG. 26. LIVERWORT MOUTH OR ROOM. 
 
 use. These mouths bring both food to nourish 
 and air to sustain the plant. A fish keeps itself 
 alive by sucking the water it lives in all the while 
 through its gills. It gets out of the water what- 
 ever it needs air and some food. The plants 
 are like fishes; their water is the great ocean of 
 air that lies on the surface of the earth. They 
 
80 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 draw it in through their months, take out of it all 
 they need, and then breathe the rest out again. 
 In Fig. 26 you see a piece of a liverwort leaf 
 1 
 
 FIG. 27. PLANT MOUTH. 
 
 hh, hollow of mouth ; H, lips. 
 
 (Iris.) 
 
 cut down through the mouth, and in Fig. 27, 
 another kind, a blue-flag. In the next chapter 
 (Fig. 30, &) you see some of the mouths of the 
 corn-plant; this is the outside view, as you see 
 your own mouth in your face when you look in 
 the glass. 
 
 Air is a curious mixture. It is a gas made of 
 several gases stirred together as you stir tea and 
 milk and sugar. One of these gases is called 
 
Plants cmd Animals Their Difference. 81 
 
 oxygen (don't be afraid of the hard names); that 
 is what keeps us alive. I won't give you the 
 name of the next, because it is only used, like the 
 milk, to weaken the tea. The third is a very dis- 
 agreeable and dangerous gas, called carbonic add 
 gas. It is this last that makes your head ache in 
 a crowded room or car. This is what you hear 
 of every now and then as choke-damp, which suf- 
 focates people down in mines and deep wells. 
 It is this which comes from burning charcoal, 
 and makes it sure death to burn it in a closed 
 room. There is very little of this dangerous stuff 
 even in close air. Carbonic acid gas, though so 
 poisonous, is made up of two things, which are 
 very good and perfectly harmless when they are 
 separated carbon and the life-giving oxygen. 
 Carbon is coal, or something like coal. United 
 together, these two harmless things make a 
 dreadfully dangerous one, just as innocent salt- 
 petre, sulphur, and charcoal unite to form the 
 deadly gunpowder. 
 
82 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 Now notice how beautifully plants and ani- 
 mals are made to live together and help each 
 other. Animals breathe in the air, and help 
 themselves to the oxygen which keeps them 
 alive, but breathe out the deadly carbonic acid 
 gas. Plants breathe in the air, separate, by some 
 wonderful power of their own, the carbonic acid 
 gas into carbon and oxygen, help themselves to 
 the carbon and breathe out the oxygen. What 
 plants consume we throw away as useless, and 
 what plants breathe out sustains our life. That 
 is the reason why the country is apt to be so 
 much more healthy than the city. The air that 
 is poisoned by people and fires becomes purified 
 by plants. 
 
 Unlike the fairies of the story-book, who do 
 all their good deeds by night, these little plant 
 fairies work only by the light. The sun is their 
 master, and his first ray is their call from sleep. 
 They set to work in a minute, separating the 
 dangerous carbonic acid gas into carbon and 
 
Plants and Animals Their Difference. 83 
 
 oxygen; and while they use the carbon and 
 grow by it as you do by your food, they are 
 giving back the sweet pure oxygen to the air. 
 All day long they are at their good work; but 
 when the sun sinks behind the hills, they do not 
 need any sunset gun to tell them their time of 
 rest has come. They drop work at once, and 
 drop their fairy ways ; they begin right away to 
 behave as the animals do to breathe in oxygen 
 and breathe out the hateful carbonic acid. That 
 is the reason it is not healthy to sleep in a room 
 with flowers at night, though they are so good to 
 have in the daytime. 
 
 We owe our lives to the plants the food we 
 eat, the pure air we breathe, as well as much of 
 the rain that falls from heaven. They are min- 
 istering angels, and the loving, tender, heavenly 
 Father has appointed them their work to do to 
 beautify the earth and purify the air under the 
 guidance of the glorious sun, which He has cre- 
 ated and which He keeps in its appointed path. 
 
84 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 - 
 
 CHAPTER YIL 
 THE THIRSTY FLOWERS. 
 
 FILL a glass with water, and let a piece of 
 common tape or a strip of muslin hang so that 
 its lower end shall dip into the water, and then 
 notice it ; the liquid creeps slowly but surely up 
 the strip. If the end which you have in your 
 hand is dropped on the table beside the glass, 
 the goblet may be entirely emptied, the water 
 running up over the edge of the glass before it 
 runs down again. This behavior of water would 
 seem very queer if we had not noticed something 
 of the kind all our lives. It is caused by what 
 is called capillary attraction. Whenever one part 
 of a material full of fine openings which lead 
 through it is dipped into a liquid, the fluid runs 
 through the whole stuff, even if it has to run up- 
 
The Thirsty Flowers. 85 
 
 ward. Try a lump of sugar: put one corner into 
 your cup of tea or hot milk, and watch it soak 
 the lump through. The burning of a lamp is upon 
 the same principle. The wick serves to carry the 
 oil from the globe of the lamp to feed the flame. 
 As soon as the oil gives out, the light fades and 
 dies away. 
 
 Every part of a plant needs water ; it must be 
 close around every little cell. These cells are the 
 tiny queer- shaped bags full of liquid that are 
 packed close together, and make up the leaves, 
 stems, and flowers of plants. In Fig. 28 you see 
 the cells of a leaf of geranium flower, and one of 
 sorrel or sour grass, which, if you are like the 
 children I know, you have many a time eaten to 
 get the pleasant sour taste. Well, every one of 
 these tiny cells must be kept wet all the time, or 
 the plant will die. The only way we can think 
 of that water could get up into the leaves and 
 flowers from the earth is by capillary attraction, 
 as it runs up the strip of muslin. And if it were 
 
86 
 
 Chapters on Pla/nt Life. 
 
 not for this singular behavior of water, the only 
 plants in the world would be those that grow in 
 the seas and rivers and lakes. The land would 
 be as barren as the desert of Sahara. 
 
 FIG. 28. CELLS. 
 A, leaf of geranium flower (Pelargonium) ; B, leat of sorrel (Oxalis). 
 
 Now try to think of some plant with all the 
 earth away a tree, for instance and you will 
 see that it is a sort of double growth ; that there 
 is an upside-down tree in the ground, with its 
 
The Thirsty Flowers. 87 
 
 trunk and branches and twigs, as well as one 
 above the ground. The underground twigs do 
 not bear leaves, but each one of them wears on 
 its head a little cap or helmet to protect the ten- 
 der growing part from being injured as it pushes 
 its way through the hard earth. The most im- 
 portant parts of a tree are those that seem of least 
 consequence, the rootlets and the leaves. These 
 are to the tree what our mouths and stomachs 
 and our lungs are to us ; the roots are the feeders, 
 and the leaves the breathing apparatus of plants. 
 As the underground tree grows, the tender 
 little roots push their way down into the dark- 
 ness and cold of the deep soil; they find their 
 way around stones and through great clods of 
 earth, anywhere and everywhere, until they get 
 their little noses into water or damp earth, and 
 then they begin to suck. Sometimes it is only 
 pure water that they take up from the earth, but 
 generally it is a sort of broth water with plant 
 food dissolved in it. 
 
88 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 The roots and stems and leaves are all full oi 
 little passageways running upward, and branch- 
 ing and dividing until they reach the leaves. 
 Fig. 29 shows a corn stalk cut across. You see 
 some roundish holes, marked a ; these are the 
 ends of tubes that run through the stalk. When 
 the corn begins to grow, take a stalk about two 
 feet highland cut it across; you will see little 
 white spots all over the cut place. This figure is 
 
 FIG. 29. CORN STALK CUT ACROSS. 
 (Zw.) 
 
 one of those white dots magnified. Figure 31 
 is the same dot viewed sidewise. 
 
 When these tubes come into the leaves, they 
 
The Thirsty Flowers. 
 
 open into little spaces just under the outside skin 
 of the leaf. These spaces are like the hollow of 
 a mouth, and each one has generally two lips that 
 
 ^-4 
 
 ^ 
 
 ; I 
 
 M 
 
 
 
 te 
 
 Mfe 
 
 N^i 
 #f 
 
 % 
 
 
 )M 
 
 ? 
 M 
 
 - ?J T. 
 
 ) 
 
 1 
 
 I 
 j 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 FIG. 30. PLANT MOUTHS. 
 
 A, corn leaf with three mouths; B, bean leaf, with mouth ; C, mouth 
 seen side wise. 
 
 (2M.) 
 
 are sometimes open and sometimes shut. Through 
 these tiny mouths (Fig. 30) the plant breathes. 
 
90 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 It draws in air, and it sends out, as you do, a 
 mixture of air and water. If you want to know 
 how much water there is in your own breath, try 
 holding a piece of cold glass before your mouth. 
 
 Plants are not wasteful of the water so neces- 
 sary to their lives. What they do not use they 
 give back to the air from which it was received, 
 as we make our thank-offerings to God for what 
 He has given us. The roots suck up the water, 
 and each little cell takes a drink as the water 
 passes it, and hands on the rest to the cell just 
 above it. And so the water takes its course, 
 supplying each thirsty cell with drink as it passes, 
 spreading through every part of the plant until 
 it reaches the little mouths. And there all that 
 is left is breathed out in a fine steam which you 
 cannot see until it touches some cold substances, 
 and is turned into water again (Fig. 31). 
 
 Some one who wanted to know exactly how 
 much water was given back to the air by grow- 
 ing plants, carefully examined a number of them, 
 
The Thirsty Flowers. 
 
 91 
 
 and found that a single sunflower plant gave off 
 in twelve hours a pound and a quarter enough 
 to fill nearly to the brim three common table 
 goblets. Another plant, the wild cornel, was 
 found to breathe out more than twice its own 
 weight of water in a day and a night. 
 
 In order to find out what parts of the flowers 
 were the principal water-carriers, a deutzia, one 
 of our most delicate 
 and beautiful spring 
 flowers, which you 
 probably know by 
 sight if not by name, 
 was put into some very 
 blue water, colored 
 with a mixture of what 
 is called aniline, and 
 in a little while every vein of the flower was a 
 beautiful dark blue. The poor little blossom was, 
 however, poisoned with its dose, and wilted away 
 in a few minutes. 
 
 FIG. 31. WATER - CARRYING 
 TUBES. SIDE VIEW OF CORN- 
 STALK TUBES. 
 
 (Zea.) 
 
92 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 The quantity of water that plants breathe off 
 is so great that it makes an entire change in the 
 climate when forests are cut down. Plants, like 
 grasses and small weeds that grow on the surface, 
 of course do not make the same difference, for 
 their roots only go down a little way. But trees 
 are very important : unless the air is kept damp 
 by the sea or some large body of water, it de- 
 pends very much upon trees for its moisture. 
 Where there are no trees, the rain that does fall 
 sinks into the earth, and runs away in little un- 
 derground currents, and is lost. There are no 
 deep roots to stop this waste, to suck up the 
 water, and restore a large part of it to the air. 
 
 In places where the rainfall is frequent, and 
 the air is always kept soft, plants may be as lavish 
 of their water as we are in the great cities where 
 the supply never fails. Plants growing in such 
 places very often keep their mouths open all the 
 time. If this were the habit of those which grow 
 in very dry places, they would soon perish of 
 
The Thirsty Flowers. 93 
 
 thirst. On the high Western plains beyond the 
 Mississippi only a few things are able to live. 
 Among these are some kinds of cactus plants, 
 
 FIG. 32. CACTUS. 
 
 which you have probably se(^ in greenhouses or 
 as window plants (Fig. 32). The reason why they 
 manage to grow such bulgy leaves and fat stems 
 where there is so little moisture, is because this 
 
94 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 plant is so very stingy of its water. It hoards it 
 up as the travellers over the great African deserts 
 do, knowing how hard it will be to get more. The 
 roots of the cactus suck up every drop of water 
 they can find, and the leaves keep their millions 
 of little mouths tight shut so as to hold it all. 
 Only such plants can grow on these plains as are 
 able to do with very little water, or else are wise 
 enough to hoard up all they can get. This water 
 we have been talking about is not sap that is 
 the blood of the plant but it is like the water 
 we drink, and which not only helps to make the 
 blood, but keeps all of the parts soft and moist 
 so that it may live. The largest part of every 
 living thing is water. It is not without good 
 reason that the Bible so often speaks of the 
 Water of Life, for without water no life could 
 exist for a single hour. 
 
Plants Caught Napping. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 PLANTS CA UGHT NAPPING. 
 
 As we come to be more intimate with plants, 
 and know all about their doings and see into 
 their daily lives, we continue to find things which 
 remind us of animals. Plants, we already know, 
 eat and drink and breathe and move. Besides 
 all these things, they sleep; and they must get 
 their sleep regularly, or they lose their health 
 completely. 
 
 Nowadays inventors spend their lives trying 
 to find out useful things things that will make 
 life easier and pleasanter: such things as steam- 
 boats and railroad cars, and telegraphs and sew- 
 ing-machines, and a thousand others of the same 
 kind. In old times all the inventions were made 
 to compel men to believe this or that religion by 
 
96 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 the use of ingenious tortures. There was no end 
 of different kinds of suffering which poor miser- 
 able people who had their own ideas on religious 
 subjects had to suffer. Among these was the 
 horrible torture of keeping people awake night 
 and day till they died. Such dreadful things 
 are ho longer practised on people in Christian 
 lands; but many and many a poor plant dies 
 and makes no sign from just this cause. 
 
 People can sleep where there is a light in the 
 room ; hardly so sweetly and soundly, I think, as 
 they can in the darkness; still they can go to 
 sleep in the light. But plants cannot. Until 
 the darkness comes they go on working and 
 working, no matter how tired they are, till the 
 plucky little creatures drop in harness and die. 
 The work they do, I have already told you, is to 
 separate the poisonous carbonic acid gas of the 
 air into two useful things carbon for themselves, 
 and oxygen to keep people and animals alive. 
 But they need rest as much as you or I do. 
 
Plants Caught Napping. 
 
 97 
 
 Working night and day is too much of a strain, 
 and finally their health breaks down and they 
 die. 
 
 Many plants are not contented merely to stop 
 working. That does not give them all the rest 
 they need. The leaves want to lie down or to 
 hug close to each other, in order to sleep com- 
 fortably and rise re- 
 freshed. If you no- 
 tice carefully a spray 
 of locust leaves, for in- 
 stance, by daylight, you 
 will see it look some- 
 thing like this (Fig. 
 33). I drew this, one 
 bright August day, 
 just as it grew on the 
 tree. The leaves are 
 all spread abroad to 
 
 , , ,, T 1 , FIG. 33. LOCUST BRANCH 
 
 catch the light and the AWAKE 
 
 breezes. The thou- 
 
98 
 
 Cha/pters on Plant Life. 
 
 sand little mouths are open, breathing in the air. 
 In the evening, after it had grown dark, I went 
 out and drew the same spray asleep (Fig. 34). 
 
 There was just light 
 enough for me to see, 
 but not enough to 
 wake the locust leaves. 
 There they lay, hugged 
 up to keep warm, their 
 little mouths pressed 
 close against each other. 
 It may seem as won- 
 derful to you as it did 
 to me when I first 
 learned it, that all your 
 lives the plant and 
 trees around you had 
 been going to sleep and 
 cuddling up in this way, and you had never no- 
 ticed or known it. When you think of it, it is 
 not really so strange, for most of the time that 
 
 FIG. 34. LOCUST BRANCH 
 ASLEEP. 
 
 (fiobinia.) 
 
Plants Caught Napping. 
 
 99 
 
 the leaves are asleep you are asleep too, and any 
 light which under ordinary circumstances would 
 show them to you, would keep them from going 
 to sleep. In order to see these sleeping leaves 
 you would have to 
 take a lantern and go 
 out after it was dark, 
 and examine sprays 
 which you had partic- 
 ularly examined by 
 day, to see just the dif- 
 ference. 
 
 The young leaves, 
 like young babies, 
 sleep more and cuddle 
 up closer than the older 
 ones do. I examined a 
 great many plants, and 
 found no other very 
 common plant more in- 
 teresting than the locust-tree. 
 
 PLA 
 
 AWAKE. 
 
 Some wistaria 
 
100 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 leaves, especially the young shoots, not only close 
 up but turn over on their stems to get their rest. 
 The most remarkable plant 
 of all that I examined was a 
 mimosa-tree, or sensitive plant, 
 as it is often called (Fig. 35). 
 This tree, however, grows full 
 thirty feet high. In Virginia, 
 where I made the drawing, you 
 can sit and watch the branches 
 against the evening sky; and as 
 the twilight falls, the entire tree 
 seems to be thinning out until 
 it looks as if the season had 
 gone backward and we were 
 looking at the tree in its early 
 
 FIG. 36. SENSITIVE spring dress of delicate sprays 
 PLANT ASLEEP.- ( F j g 35^ ft puts one j n m j u( j 
 
 of Keats's beautiful line, when speaking of a love- 
 ly girl going to sleep 
 
 " As if a rose should shut and be a bud again." 
 
Plants Caught Napping. 101 
 
 It sometimes happens that plants which usually 
 close their leaves when they sleep are very heav- 
 ily shaded during the day. When this is the 
 case they do not seem to be much affected by the 
 darkness of the night, and do not change the po- 
 sition of their leaves. It would seem as if they 
 had been half asleep all day, and so had spoiled 
 their night's rest. Darwin tells us of a plant 
 which he says he watched carefully, and for two 
 nights after having been violently shaken by the 
 wind it did not cuddle down to sleep. It was 
 probably too much excited to rest properly. 
 
 This movement of sleep is so much affected by 
 the presence or absence of water, which you re- 
 member is the cause of all vegetable movement, 
 that if the ground in which the plant grows is 
 allowed to get very dry, or the air becomes ex- 
 tremely parched around it, it makes no sleep 
 movement at night. The " touch-me-not " and 
 mallow are affected in this way by drought. 
 Mr. Darwin tried to see how long a little plant 
 
102 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 he had from Chili would live without water. 
 He watched it for three weeks without giving it 
 a drop to drink. Its leaves became dry and 
 dusty, so that some of them would drop off from 
 the stem every time he shook the pot. The earth 
 about the roots became like the dust on a sum- 
 mer road. The leaves that remained on the stem 
 did not close in sleep at night. Finally, at the 
 end of twenty-one days, he watered the earth and 
 sponged off the dry and thirsty leaves. The next 
 morning it seemed as fresh as ever, and when 
 night came it nestled itself down comfortably to 
 its rest. 
 
 Some plants will go to sleep if they can make 
 themselves comfortable; while if they are very 
 much chilled by exposure to the cold night air 
 they will not make a sleep movement. There is 
 something almost human in all these freaks of 
 wakefulness in the plant world. 
 
 In some plants the leaves stand up to go to 
 sleep, as horses do ; in others they droop down, 
 
Plants Caught Napping. 103 
 
 or lie close to each other like little children. 
 One kind of clover which has a yellow blossom 
 
 2. 
 
 FIG. 37. 
 
 1, YELLOW CLOVER A, awake; B, asleep. 
 
 2, COMMON WHITE CLOVER. . . A, awake; B, asleep. 
 
 (Trifolium.) 
 
 sleeps very curiously (Fig. 37) ; it has, as of course 
 you know, three leaflets on each stalk. Each of 
 the three twists itself around through the quar- 
 ter of a circle, turning one of the side edges to the 
 
104 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 sky. Two of the leaflets the side ones face 
 towards the north, one a little to the east of north, 
 the other a little to the west. The middle leaflet 
 turns sometimes eastward, sometimes westward ; 
 in doing so it twists itself over so as to protect 
 its own upper surface and one "of the other leaf- 
 lets at the same time. The common white clover 
 also sleeps very curiously. 
 
 There is a very singular plant which bears 
 three leaves on a stem, the middle one being 
 large, and the other two long narrow leaflets 
 which stand straight out from the stem just be- 
 low the bottom of the large central leaf. They 
 look like a pair of oars poised in the hands of a 
 rower when he is waiting to dip them into the 
 water. When this plant goes to sleep the small 
 stein which holds the leaf stands straight up, and 
 the leaf turns directly down flat against the stalk. 
 The plant hardly looks like the same thing awake 
 and asleep. 
 
 Besides the sleep movement this plant has 
 
Plants Caught Napping. 
 
 105 
 
 some wonderful motions, which seem to be with- 
 out any particular reason, and to come generally 
 from change of temperature. Mr. Darwin put 
 the stem of one of these leaves into some water 
 cool enough to be pleasant to drink, and then 
 changed the water for some about as warm as 
 lukewarm tea. The leaflets began to move, and 
 in a minute and a half had made a complete 
 circle. In very young plants of this kind the 
 leaflets jerk all the while, very much as a baby 
 kicks its legs and moves its arms, without having 
 any particular reason for doing it. 
 
 When leaves get sleepy they do not sink stead- 
 ily and quietly down. There is nobody to take 
 them and lay them 
 down to sleep when 
 they feel drowsy, so 
 they go off by them- 
 selves in a slow sort 
 of nodding motion. 
 Fig. 38 shows the path 
 
 5 P.M. 5.30 P.M. 6 P.M. 6.3U P.M. 
 
 FIG. 38. THE PATH OF THE NOD. 
 
106 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 that one of these little sleepy heads moved over 
 before it went off sound asleep. 
 
 The cause of all these movements is, as we shall 
 see when we study the movements of growing 
 and climbing plants, the shifting of water from 
 cell to cell, but the reason for them is the same 
 which makes two little children sleeping side by 
 side draw closer together when they feel chilly, 
 and nestle down together in the bed. The 
 warmth of their bodies then is not lost, but 
 passes from one to the other. 
 
liverworts. 107 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 LIVERWORTS. 
 
 ONE beautiful September day I started out, 
 basket in hand, to hunt for some curious plants 
 that I had been reading about, and which had in- 
 terested me very much. I had often noticed, as 
 you have probably done, curious flat leaves, with 
 curled-up edges, growing on damp paving-stones 
 or around a spring, clinging close to the stones or 
 wet ground, and carpeting them with a mat of 
 rich dark green. 
 
 As soon as I began reading about the liver- 
 worts I recognized my old friends at once, and 
 was anxious to see them again now that I knew 
 something about their ways. A friend who was 
 interested in my studies promised to show me the 
 way to a spot where they grew, and this Septem- 
 ber day was set apart for the excursion. 
 
108 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 After leaving the street cars we turned down 
 a side path and entered a deep cut, and in anoth- 
 er minute a great wall of uneven rock and earth 
 stood in front of us, covered from top to bottom 
 with the most exquisite green. Mosses clung 
 close like a rich velvet mantle, ferns reared their 
 delicate fronds, tiny weeds fresh from the continual 
 sprinkling of a stream of water which trickled 
 over the rock grew in all the little crannies, and 
 close around a spring which had hollowed out a 
 small basin for itself in a ledge of the solid rock 
 grew the liverwort. 
 
 Besides what I had seen before in the liver- 
 worts I now found that the leaves were spotted all 
 over with diamond-shaped markings of a darker 
 green, each of which had a dot in the centre, and 
 that they were covered underneath with a num- 
 ber of white glassy hairs, which laid hold of the 
 rock, and glued the leaves down so tightly that 
 it was very hard to loosen them. 
 
 There were three other kinds of outgrowths 
 
Liverworts. 109 
 
 upon the leaves, which I want to show you when 
 we have done examining the leaves themselves. 
 Fig. 39, a, is a leaf which I brought home to draw 
 
 FIG. 39. LEAF OF LIVERWORT. 
 
 a, pocket disks ; 6, seed disks ; c, nest 
 
 (Marchantia.} 
 
 for you ; b is another from a place close by. Fig. 
 40 is a piece of the same leaf magnified. You 
 see the diamond-shaped spots plainly in this, with 
 the little dot in the centre. Now I want to make 
 you understand clearly the meaning of these spots 
 and their central dot. 
 
 Just imagine that this irregular piece of leaf is 
 a large low house, only one story high, made up 
 of quantities of little rooms placed side by side, 
 and with no entries or passageways between them. 
 The under side of the leaf is the floor of the house 
 
510 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 the top is the roof, and the diamond-shaped spots 
 all over the top are the roofs of the separate 
 rooms ; each spot is a single roof, and covers in 
 one room. The dot in the centre is a wonderful 
 little chimney that leads out of the room into the 
 
 7i 
 
 FIG. 40. PART OF LEAF OF LIVERWORT, MAGNIFIED. 
 h, root hairs. 
 (MarcJiantia.) 
 
 open air, and keeps it fresh. These chimneys are 
 for the same purpose as the lips we have been ex- 
 amining in the corn-plant ; the rooms are the hol- 
 lows of the mouths, but instead of two simple lips 
 opening into a hollow the liverwort has this cu- 
 
liverworts. 
 
 rious chimney-like opening and looks so little like 
 a mouth that I did not want to make it harder to 
 understand by calling it so. These rooms have 
 no doors or windows ; they have only these chim- 
 neys, for their inhabitants never want to come 
 and go ; they only want light and air, and these 
 they get through the chimneys. We have been 
 looking at the liverwort rooms from above; a 
 good magnifying-glass will let you look right down 
 the chimney's throat into the rooms, and see the lit- 
 tle inhabitants. Now 
 I want to take off the 
 front of one of them as 
 you take off the front 
 of a baby-house to look FlG 41 ._ LEAF OF LIVERWORT 
 in Fig 41 is a room CUT THROUGH ONE ROOM AND 
 
 FLOOR. 
 CUt in this Way, though r , roof; c, chimney ; w, wall ; p, plants 
 
 this is cut right down 
 
 through the middle, so 
 
 that the chimney is sliced in two, and you may 
 
 see how it is built. 
 
 growing inside ; /, floor. 
 (Marchantia.) 
 
112 Chapters on Plcmt Life. 
 
 The floor,/, is very thick, made up of three or 
 four rows of cells; the walls (w) are only one 
 cell deep ; the roof (r) slopes up from every side 
 towards the chimney (c*), which is in the mid- 
 dle. The chimney, as you see, is built of rows 
 of cells, one laid on top of another, just as the 
 bricks are laid in our chimneys. The inhabitants 
 are like the inhabitants of a greenhouse; they 
 are queer little plants, something like the cactus 
 plant so common in greenhouses or as a window 
 plant. 
 
 The liverwort is a plant that seems to be all 
 leaves. There is no regular stem, but the leaves 
 grow on and on, one out of another; the roots (A) 
 are the little glassy hairs that grow from the un- 
 der part of the leaf. What takes the place of a 
 flower that is, the part that produces the seed 
 also grows out of the leaf. I hope you noticed 
 in Fig. 39, &, the odd little umbrella-shaped things 
 that came out of one, and the blunt, clumsy scal- 
 loped clubs out of the other, a. If not, you may 
 
Liverwwts. 113 
 
 look back now and see them, for they are very 
 curious little things. 
 
 The first we will examine under the magnifier. 
 Fig. 39, &, is like a little umbrella deeply scalloped 
 about the edge. In Fig. 42 you may see it in two 
 
 a c 
 
 FIG. 42. SEED DISK. 
 
 a, 6, seed disks, two positions ; c, vegetable bottle. 
 (Marchantia.) 
 
 positions very much enlarged. No drawing can 
 give you the least idea how beautiful this is under 
 the microscope (Fig. 42, a) ; the delicate green 
 spotted with a deeper tint of the same color and 
 from beneath lovely irregular fringes, which look 
 as if they were made of glistening spun glass. 
 
 8 
 
114 Chapters on Pla/nt Life. 
 
 r 
 
 When you turn it over () you see nestling be- 
 tween the bright fringes a little round body like 
 a pea in its pod ; this body comes after the seed, 
 If I had looked for iny liverwort earlier I would 
 not have seen this pea, but would have found 
 something even more singular, which comes before 
 it, as the flower comes before the fruit. We can- 
 not talk about things without having some name 
 to call them by, and as the names the botanists 
 give these things are very long and hard and 
 puzzling, we will name them for ourselves, and 
 call these long scalloped umbrellas seed disks, for 
 they grow the seed. 
 
 After the seed disks have grown, down between 
 the fringes a tiny bud sprouts, which, when it is 
 complete, is an odd, pretty little vegetable bottle 
 with a ball in the middle (Fig. 42, c), reminding 
 one of the water-bottles with ice frozen in them 
 that we sometimes see at restaurants. When the 
 bottles are full grown the neck peeps out from 
 between the fringes, waiting for something. 
 
Liverworts. 
 
 115 
 
 Now we will have to go back, as they do in 
 the story-books, and see what the bottles are 
 stretching out their little necks for. On the other 
 growths (Fig. 39, a) you see some queer little 
 toadstools which grow underneath the leaf, and 
 curve around upward till they stand straight 
 up ; these usually grow on another plant near by 
 the seed disk, and while one is growing the other 
 is doing the same thing. 
 Now look at one of 
 these little toadstools 
 (they are not really 
 toadstools, but they 
 look like them). This 
 was cut with a sharp 
 razor right down 
 through the middle, as ^ 43._ WHI p. CA8E . 
 
 We did the tiny room <* pocket disks ; &, egg-shaped body; 
 
 c, whips ; A, root hairs. 
 
 of the leaf, and you are 
 
 looking at it sidewise. 
 
 You see (Fig. 43, a) that it is all full of little 
 
116 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 pockets, and that standing on end in each pocket 
 is something like an egg. Fig. 43, &, is this egg 
 enlarged still more. 
 
 Each of these eggs is like an immense prison, 
 with hundreds of cells built story on story. In 
 each cell is an impatient little prisoner waiting to 
 get out. You remember I told you the liver- 
 worts always lived where there was plenty of 
 water. The water is the fairy that finally lets 
 the prisoners free. It trickles into the pockets 
 and fills them, and the prison walls swell and 
 crack and free the captives. Funny-looking little 
 things they are, too, when they get out ! Put 
 them in a little water on a piece of glass and look 
 at them through your microscope, and you will 
 see hundreds of little blunt-handled whips, each 
 with a couple of lashes (Fig. 43, <?), which have 
 the singular power of whipping around without 
 any help. 
 
 By some unknown means beyond our guessing 
 these diligent little whips, sooner or later in their 
 
Liverworts. 117 
 
 active trips through the water, find the open 
 mouths of the bottles in the seed disk, and whip 
 themselves in. This was what the bottle was 
 waiting for; and the ball in the bottle, and the 
 whip which has found its way into it, enter on a 
 very close partnership. Just such a partnership 
 as this must be made for the formation of every 
 seed. 
 
 In ordinary plants the seed formed in this way 
 falls into the ground and makes a new plant, but 
 the liverworts do not. Without leaving its home 
 between the glassy fringes the seed grows till it 
 makes the round pea which we saw in Fig. 42, b; 
 this is made up of a quantity of a kind of seed 
 called spores, and whole bundles of long elastic 
 threads, which, when they are ripe, snap and flirt 
 the seed everywhere about, so that one single 
 seed produces thousands of spores, which sow 
 themselves broadcast. 
 
 Besides these curious arrangements for sowing 
 themselves, there is yet another. The liverworts, 
 
118 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 when they find themselves in very comfortable 
 quarters, get lazy; they grow and spread and 
 take their ease, and don't seem to care whether 
 any other liverworts come after them when they 
 die or not ; no little disks grow on them to make 
 seed and sow themselves ; but whether these disks 
 
 ;_.'& 
 
 FIG. 44. CUPULE, on NEST 
 (Marchantia.) 
 
 grow or not, they almost always have on their 
 leaves the little nests marked c on Fig. 39. 
 
 Now let us put one of these under the micro- 
 scope and look at it. If it was hard to give any 
 idea of the seed disk by means of a mere picture, 
 it is impossible here. The nests are the most 
 
Liverworts. 119 
 
 exquisite things imaginable: the shape you see 
 in Fig. 44, but they look as if they were carved 
 out of a pale emerald, the fringed points shining 
 and glistening, and down in the bottom of the 
 nest lies a treasure -trove of carved gems of a 
 deeper green. Over it all one would imagine 
 diamond dust had been sprinkled, as it glitters 
 and sparkles in the light. These little gems are 
 spores which are washed out of the nest, and 
 taking root, make new plants to bear new nests 
 as beautiful as themselves. 
 
 Upon pots in most greenhouses you will find 
 quantities of another kind of liverwort, not nearly 
 so beautiful as the one I have been describing. 
 Instead of the nests there are little crescent- 
 shaped pockets which hold the spores. Another 
 kind has a little upright flask which holds them. 
 But whatever shape they may be, and whether 
 the seed-making disks are on the leaves or not, 
 some kind of cup or pocket for the spores is 
 always formed. 
 
120 Chapters on Plcmt Life. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 MOSSES. 
 
 You must have noticed, whether you live in 
 the city or the country, how quickly a velvety 
 coat of moss forms wherever it can get a chance. 
 It needs plenty of shade and moisture, and where 
 it finds these things it grows quickly: roofs and 
 pavements, water- butts and troughs, tree-trunks 
 and rocks, soon cover themselves with a rich 
 plush garment of green or brown when left un- 
 disturbed, if they are in damp and shady places. 
 
 Moss was the world's first compass. Before 
 people had ventured out into the great waters 
 the compass was only needed to guide men 
 through the forests on dark and cloudy days. 
 By looking at the trees the wild hunter could 
 tell where the north was, because the mosses 
 
Mosses. 121 
 
 grow on that side, nestling in the shade, where 
 the dew and the rain lie longest. 
 
 Perhaps you have never really examined moss. 
 Looking at it carelessly, you have naturally 
 thought that there were only a few kinds, and 
 these kinds very much alike. Now if you are 
 anywhere that you can study them, take your 
 pocket -microscope, and you will find that you 
 are very much mistaken. There are in reality 
 a great many kinds of mosses, differing from each 
 other almost as much as the flowers in your gar- 
 den do. The moss-plant is so tiny that you must 
 look through your microscope to see how really 
 beautiful it is; but a careful examination with- 
 out the help of the glass will probably show you 
 much that you have never noticed before. 
 
 Before we go any further, let me tell you, if 
 you have not one of the child's microscopes with 
 all the little tools to dissect flowers and see in- 
 sects with, how to make yourself some dissecting 
 needles. Make with a penknife several little 
 
122 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 bits of wood, something like a piece of a wooden 
 pen-handle ; into one end of each push the head 
 of a No. 8 sewing needle. You can easily do this, 
 if the little handles are made of pine or cedar, 
 either by holding the needle with a pair of com- 
 mon pliers, or by pushing carefully against some 
 wood, so as not to break the point. 
 
 When you are ready to dissect your leaf or 
 flower, lay it on a small piece of glass. If the 
 flower is light, put a piece of black stuff under 
 the glass; if it is dark, put some white paper 
 under it, to help you see it easily. Then take 
 one of your needles in one hand and one in the 
 other, and pull the object, little by little, to 
 pieces. This is called " teasing out " the leaf. 
 In this way you will find out a great many 
 things about it which you would never find by 
 merely pulling it to pieces with your fingers. 
 If you have a microscope or magnifying - glass, 
 put each piece under it and examine it closely. 
 It is very interesting work, and when you find 
 
123 
 
 one curious thing after another, you will never 
 think of calling it tiresome. I have spent two 
 steady hours teasing out a tiny water-plant to 
 find one particular kind of bud, but I found it at 
 last, and then all the work seemed easy enough. 
 
 While I was writing this I 
 thought I would see if I could 
 not find some moss in the 
 garden, and in about five 
 minutes I have gathered five 
 different kinds of moss. One 
 little patch that is lying be- 
 fore me I will tell you about, 
 so that you may look for 
 some like it; it is a very 
 common kind. On a square 
 inch of earth I found hun- 
 dreds of little green clumps 
 (Fig. 45). From among 
 these spring up some slender 
 
 L B 
 
 red stems, from half an inch 
 
 FlG - 45 - 
 
 Moss SPORE-CASES. 
 
124 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 to an inch in height. Each of these stems bears 
 a curved pod, some with caps and some without. 
 In Fig. 45 the right-hand one, B, has its cap 
 
 on, while A has lost 
 its cover. The caps 
 fit on so easily that I 
 can lift them off with a 
 touch. These pods are 
 the little vases that 
 hold the moss spores, 
 from which new moss- 
 plants will grow. 
 When they are ripe, 
 and ready to be sowed, 
 the vase will attend to 
 the business, and scat- 
 ter them far and wide. 
 The caps come off, and 
 the tiny seed in the 
 
 FIG. 46. YOUNG Moss PLANT. vase are blown out by 
 
 A, spore ; r, root; Z, leaf; . , 
 
 B, young plant. the wind or washed 
 
Mosses. 125 
 
 out by the rain. Other mosses have different 
 shaped vases, some of them very beautiful. 
 
 A new moss- plant begins from one of the 
 spores which lies on the ground. The dampness 
 makes the spore begin to swell. One little bud 
 pushes itself out at one end, and another at the 
 other (Fig. 46, A). A is the spore, I the leaf- 
 bud, r the root-bud. At first these buds seem 
 just alike, but very soon we begin to see a differ- 
 ence : one bud lies on the ground, and gets brown 
 and ugly, r; the other, ?, grows up into the air 
 and becomes green, and sends out little fairy-like 
 stems and leaves. But both grow and spread, 
 the leaf-bud to make the velvet sheet of moss, 
 the root-bud to make a tangle which pushes its 
 way into the ground below. Both the root-bud 
 and leaf-bud are necessary to the life of the plant 
 and to each other. The root drinks in the water 
 and food from the earth ; the leaf breathes in the 
 air and sunshine. The happy little bud in the 
 air is not too proud and selfish to help its ugly 
 
126 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 E 
 
 little brother who is digging 
 down into the earth. They work 
 lovingly together, helping each 
 other and all the family of which 
 they are members. In Fig. 46, 
 B, you see the beginning of a 
 plant; the buds grow and branch, 
 and set up cross partitions, so that 
 what was at first one long nar- 
 row room or cell is now many 
 such rooms placed end to end. 
 
 After the plant has grown, 
 sometimes till it has covered sev- 
 eral square inches of ground, it 
 begins to get ready to grow the 
 parts that correspond to a flower. 
 Little buds curled up close in a 
 bunch of leaves begin to grow 
 FIG. 47. WHIP-CASE, on the ends of the branches. In 
 
 o f eac h o f 
 
 d, whips escaping; J?, 
 whips coiled ; C, 
 
 whips free. bunches grows a curious little 
 
 (Funaria.) 
 
127 
 
 sack or bottle. In Fig. 47, A, is one 
 taken out of the middle of a little 
 bunch of leaves. This is a sort of 
 whip-case with quantities of little 
 double-lashed whips, d, escaping. B 
 is one of the whips coiled in its 
 little pocket, and C is another, free. 
 While this whip- case has been 
 growing, on the same plant, or an- 
 other near by, another bud is form- 
 ing in a bunch of leaves (Fig. 48). 
 This bud looks like a bottle with 
 a small body and a long curved 
 neck. In the midst of the body is 
 a round object: this is the ovule, 
 the whips are the pollen, and when 
 a partnership is formed between the 
 two, we have the beginning of a 
 true seed. This is all so much FIG. 48. OVULE- 
 like the liverworts that I have not 
 gone into it very particularly. If 
 
 CASE - 
 
 o, ovule. 
 
138 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 you have forgotten look back at the last chapter. 
 
 The whips, when they get out of the pockets, go 
 
 lashing around in the water near the moss till 
 
 they find the mouth of 
 the bottle. They go in 
 there, and work their 
 way down to the 
 ovule. Here the two 
 seem to melt into one, 
 and the seed is begun, 
 If there is no water, 
 and the partnership 
 is not formed, the 
 moss -plant drops its 
 spores, and new plants 
 are formed from them ; 
 but it seems better to 
 have some seed plants 
 every now and then : 
 
 the moss-bed seems strengthened by them. 
 
 The moss-plant, begun in either way, grows and 
 
 FIG. 49. SPHAGNUM ENLABGED. 
 
Mosses. 
 
 spreads, creeping over earth or bark or rock, till 
 it makes a beautiful velvet bed ; it sends up its 
 pods and scatters its spores ; new plants spring up, 
 and so it goes on, and has 
 gone on for thousands 
 and thousands of years. 
 
 There is a very com- 
 mon kind of moss that 
 grows in poor, miserable 
 ground, which has some 
 wonderful things about 
 it. Fig. 49 gives a pict- 
 ure of the plant, magni- 
 fied ; in Fig. 50 you may 
 see the beautiful whip- 
 case of this moss. 
 
 I have tried to make 
 the curious way in which 
 leaves are built up of 
 
 , FIG. 50. WHIP-CASE. 
 
 cells clear to you by 
 
 J d, whips and whip magnified. 
 
 comparing them to (Sphagnum.) 
 
130 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 houses with rooms built story above story and 
 side by side. This moss I am telling you about 
 is like a very large, rambling, one -storied house. 
 It is not a private house, though, for there are 
 
 ever so many rooms 
 with round doors that 
 open out, and in these 
 rooms certain funny 
 little water -insects 
 take refuge just as cool- 
 ly as if they had paid 
 their rent and carried 
 the door- key in their 
 side pockets. Fig. 51 
 gives a piece of one of 
 these leaves very much 
 
 FIG. 51.-SPHAGNUM-LEAF enlarged : r, r, r, are the 
 MAGNIFIED. rooms to let, and I, I, I, 
 
 r t r, r t rooms ; Z, Z, I, doors. . ' 
 
 the doors into them. 
 
 Mosses do not seem to be of much value; we 
 are apt to think of them as poor, useless little 
 
Mosses. 131 
 
 things of very little account, especially the dry 
 sphagnum moss. But this is not really the case. 
 Just as the wood of the trees that died thousands 
 of years ago has made our coal, so the sphagnum 
 moss of those old times has made the peat bogs 
 of Ireland. You must have heard or read how 
 the poor Irish people, who cannot afford to burn 
 coal or wood, make their rooms warm and cook 
 their meals by peat which they dig from the 
 bogs. This peat is the sphagnum moss, packed 
 layer upon layer, as year after year a new crop 
 grew on top of the old one. 
 
132 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 FERNS. 
 
 OUT in the pleasaut woods, where the shade is 
 so thick that the sun cannot manage to get through 
 the leaves to dry up the moisture, the ferns love 
 to grow ; they delight in mossy dells, and dripping 
 rocks, and gently rippling streams, and about such 
 places you will be most likely to find them large 
 and fine. 
 
 Did you ever notice the little fern leaf as it 
 lifts its head above the grass ? It comes up, all 
 curled up, hugging itself close to keep warm, 
 it would seem. Pretty soon the coil begins to 
 loosen, and the stem to straighten itself out, and 
 the little leaves to unfold and stretch themselves 
 in the sweet air and sunshine (Fig. 52). 
 
 Every child and very nearly every grown per- 
 
Fem,s. 
 
 133 
 
 son who roams the woods for wild flowers learns 
 to love ferns : their fresh, bright, green, and deli- 
 cate leaves make 
 up for the want 
 of blossoms. Some 
 of them droop and 
 fade very quickly 
 in water, but oth- 
 ers stay fresh for 
 a long time, and 
 make a beautiful 
 bouquet of them- 
 selves, or with 
 bright autumn 
 leaves. Nothing 
 else that grows 
 is so beautiful 
 and natural when 
 pressed as fern 
 
 leaves; perhaps that is why every one is tempted 
 to gather them. 
 
 FIG. 52. YOUNG FEKN. 
 
134 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 Ferns, like the liverworts and mosses, do not 
 bear flowers. Let us take any common fern and 
 examine it. On the back of the leaf, if it is late 
 enough in the season, you will 
 find some patches which look 
 like rust. On some leaves 
 these splotches are spotted reg- 
 ularly over the leaf, or along 
 lines (Fig. 53); on others they 
 form a lace -like pattern; on 
 others again they are dotted 
 around the edge, as in the 
 maiden-hair fern. When you 
 look closely at this rust it ap- 
 pears like a sort of powder, but 
 the minute you put it under a 
 magnifying-glass you see how 
 curious it is. Every grain of 
 the dust is a little roundish case 
 full of brown specks. The cases are sacs to hold 
 the spores (Fig. 54, A, B). These spores, you re- 
 
 FIG. 53. LEAF WITH 
 SPORE- CASES ON BACK. 
 
Ferns. 
 
 135 
 
 member, are a kind of seed, each one capable of 
 producing a new plant. Nearly surrounding the 
 sac is what looks like a 
 necklace of clear beads : , 
 these beads are really a 
 row of thick small cells 
 that draw together as 
 the whole case dries, 
 and finally split open 
 the case and let the 
 spores free (Fig. 54, ). 
 Different ferns have 
 
 , . , f FIG. 54. 
 
 various kinds of spore ^ 8pore . case . ^ case 8plit open> 
 
 Cases; almost all Of letting spores escape; 6, &, spores. 
 
 them grow in some sort of a pocket. Some fern 
 leaves have shallow pockets on each side of the 
 middle vein, or stem, that runs through the leaf; 
 others have their edges doubled over to form the 
 pockets. The maiden-hair fern has, as you know, 
 beautiful polished black stems and shield-shaped 
 leaves. In each scallop at the top of the leaf is 
 
136 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 a pocket full of spore-cases, which looks, to your 
 naked eye, like an ornamental dot to improve the 
 appearance of the leaf. 
 
 If you happen to have some of the creeping 
 Hartford fern, which is used so much for decora- 
 tion, examine it, and you will see that it has all 
 along the stem large leaves with no spots on 
 the back, but at the end of each branch is a 
 number of small and slender leaves; turn these 
 over, and you will find the whole leaf covered 
 with the rusty powder. Such ferns as these are 
 sometimes called incorrectly flowering ferns. Cor- 
 rectly speaking, they have two kinds of leaves 
 one which bears and one which does not bear 
 spores. The flowering plants belong to a higher 
 class of vegetable life. 
 
 The fern family are not very aristocratic mem- 
 bers of society in the vegetable world ; they are 
 classed with mosses and liverworts and other 
 flowerless plants. But in their own class they 
 stand highest; they are the first, as we go from 
 
Ferns. 137 
 
 the lower to the higher, that have real roots, roots 
 with a root-cap, and the curious air-vessels run- 
 ning through them, which you see in Fig. 55. 
 Some of these air-vessels are wonderfully beauti- 
 ful. Did you never notice, when you broke a 
 tough, green, juicy stem of a plant, how some 
 threads seemed to break hardest, and hung out 
 of the broken end of the stem as if they had been 
 stretched longer than the rest of it. These strings 
 are the air-vessels : I would like to show you how 
 beautiful they are when we look at them through 
 a microscope. These fibres help to strengthen 
 the plant, as your muscles do your body, and 
 they are at the same time air-passages ; they are 
 both muscles and lungs in one. Every leaf and 
 stem and root in all the plants that have flowers 
 or fruit, in all the forest - trees in fact, in every 
 plant higher (not in size, but in kind) than the 
 mosses are full of these wonderful and beautiful 
 air-vessels. 
 
 Since I cannot show you the vessels themselves, 
 
138 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 I will do the best I can, and show the likeness of 
 a bundle of them taken out of a fern leaf some 
 time ago and put under the microscope (Fig. 55). 
 Is not it wonderful that so much beauty should 
 
 FIG. 55. AIR-VESSELS OF FERN. 
 
 be hidden away in every leaf and stem and blade 
 of grass where no one ever suspected it, until of 
 late years men have found it? 
 
 Now let us take one of the tiny fern spores and 
 drop it on the damp earth and see what happens. 
 
Ferns. 
 
 The spore swells with soaking up the water, one 
 side cracks open, 
 and after a while 
 a little bit of 
 a white head, 
 something like 
 the end of a white 
 worm, pushes it- 
 self out. As this 
 grows it sets up 
 partition walls, 
 making new cells 
 on every side, till 
 finally we have 
 
 a little thin, flat, B 
 
 pale green leaf ly- 
 ing close against 
 the ground (Fig. 
 56). It holds to 
 
 FIG. 56. LEAF OF FERN. 
 
 the gl'OUnd, and A, Flat first-leaf; a a, ovule-cases; 66, whip- 
 cases; <r, whips coiled up; B, whip -cases 
 and ovule-cases enlarged. 
 
 sucks its moist- 
 
140 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 lire by thread-like root hairs growing from the 
 lower side. On the upper side, after a while, little 
 knobs begin to show, dotting the leaf irregularly. 
 Under the magnify ing-glass these dots are seen 
 to be of two kinds. One kind has within it a 
 round body (Fig. 56, A, a), the ovule; the other 
 a number of little whip-cases, such as the mosses 
 and liverworts have (Fig. 56, A, Z>). This leaf 
 with these tiny knobs is what the fern has in 
 place of flowers. The ovule is like those inside 
 the moss and liverwort bottles; the whip-cases 
 are also like the whip-cases in the mosses and 
 liverworts. 
 
 When the ovule is ripe, and the whips com- 
 pletely grown, the knob opens ; the opening above 
 the ovule (Fig. 56, B, a) is filled with mucilage, 
 \ which catches any of the unwary little whips 
 lashing about in (Fig. 56, B, G) the water where 
 the leaf is growing. A partnership is formed be- 
 tween the whip and an ovule, and together they 
 grow into a true seed. This seed then acts like 
 
Ferns. 141 
 
 any other seed, sprouts, sends out leaves and roots, 
 and we have a fern plant. In ordinary plants the 
 roots and stems and leaves grow first, and then 
 comes the flower which bears the seed. In the 
 mosses and ferns the part that stands in the place 
 of a flower grows all by itself and produces its 
 seed ; this then grows into a plant, bears spores, 
 which are rather like tiny slips or buds from the 
 plant than like seed. These in their turn produce 
 the little " first leaf," and so it goes on, two dis- 
 tinct and separate growths being necessary to 
 fill out the whole life of every single plant of 
 the fern family. 
 
142 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 FLOWERS IN FANCY DRESS. 
 
 I REMEMBER as well as though it were yester- 
 day how, years and years ago, when I was a very 
 little girl, I very often roamed through the beau- 
 tiful woods of Southern Ohio, hunting for a cer- 
 tain wild-flower. 
 
 The object of my search was a flower not often 
 found, which we children called the Indian moc- 
 casin. It did look like a moccasin, indeed, with 
 its round blunt toe and yellow, leathery, shoe- 
 shaped poucho I wonder if any prospector ever 
 looked for signs of gold with more intense excite- 
 ment than I felt when searching for my little gold- 
 en shoe ? Everywhere I turned, in my breathless 
 haste, yellow moccasins seemed dancing before 
 my eyes, and I hardly knew, till my eager hands 
 
Flowers in Fancy Dress. 
 
 143 
 
 had grasped the stem, whether it was a real 
 flower I had found or not. I hardly think I 
 could have valued it 
 more if I had known 
 what I have since learn- 
 ed about the wonderful 
 ways of the orchids, to 
 which family my moc- 
 casin belonged. 
 
 You may never have 
 found this particular 
 plant in your rambles, 
 and yet may know some 
 other of the orchid tribe 
 which grows wild in 
 our woods. The com- 
 mon names are so differ- 
 ent in different places 'that it is hard to tell you 
 how to know them when you see them. The 
 putty-root, and the lady's-slipper something like 
 that in Fig. 57, are some of them. The flower 
 
 FIG. 57. LADY'S-SLIPPER. 
 (Cypripedium.) 
 
144 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 given in Fig. 57 is a cultivated plant, not exactly 
 like any wild one, but a good deal like them< 
 
 Not the touch-me- 
 not, a plant whose 
 seed-pods snap and 
 curl up if you touch 
 them, and which is 
 sometimes called 
 lady's-slipper. 
 
 The orchids are 
 an eccentric family. 
 There is scarcely 
 one of them which 
 is not " queer " in some way or other. They seem 
 
 FlG. 58. BUTTEKFLY ORCHID. 
 
 (Oncidium.) 
 
Flowers in Fwncy Dress. 
 
 145 
 
 always to be trying to look 
 or to act like something 
 besides flowers. They imi- 
 tate all sorts of things 
 besides little Indian shoes. 
 I wish I could take you 
 into an orchid greenhouse 
 and let you look around. 
 You would think you had 
 been invited to a fancy- 
 dress party of the flowers. 
 There is one that looks 
 for all the world like a 
 swan, with its long curved 
 neck; there is a beautiful 
 butterfly with spotted gold- 
 en wings (Fig. 58). Fig. 
 59 looks like a stalk up 
 which some queer little 
 ant -like creatures seem 
 
 climbing. Bees and spi- 
 
 10 
 
 FIG. 59. CLIMBING ORCHID. 
 
 (Catena.) 
 
146 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 ders, done in brown and yellow, or perhaps more 
 gorgeous colors, are all around. Here is a long 
 spike of waxen flowers, and in the cup of each 
 nestles a pure white dove with outspreading 
 wings. The Spaniards have given it a name 
 which means the flower of the Holy Ghost, from 
 its resemblance to a dove. 
 
 These strange likenesses to other things are, 
 however, the least wonderful thing about orchids. 
 They differ from ordinary plants in many singu- 
 lar ways. Many of them, instead of growing in 
 the ground, and drawing from it their food and 
 drink, grow in the air, and take nourishment from 
 it by means of their naked dangling roots. It 
 seems sometimes as if living as they do, high up 
 on the bark of trees, had put the notion into their 
 heads of trying to look like birds and butterflies 
 and bees. 
 
 The air manages to supply them with food, but 
 they have to depend upon getting drink in some 
 other way. Plants are a good deal like people 
 
Flowers in Fancy Dress. 
 
 147 
 
 in that respect; they can manage to get along 
 somehow with very little food, but they soon die 
 of thirst if deprived of water. 
 
 In a wild state the air-plants grow on the bark 
 of trees or on other substances, but they send 
 their little roots into 
 the moist bark or moss 
 to get water. They do 
 not feed on the juices 
 of the trees, as parasites 
 like the fungi and lich- 
 ens and mistletoe do; 
 they only want a stand- 
 ing-place, something to 
 push against as they 
 grow, and plenty of 
 water. In the green- 
 house they are usually 
 planted in pots filled 
 with bits of stone and damp moss, or they grow 
 attached to the parent plant, as you may see in 
 
 FIG. 60. YOUNG PLANT GROW- 
 ING ON FLOWER STEM. 
 (Dendrobium.) 
 
148 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 Fig. 60, and send their roots out into the air for 
 food. A few of them the Indian moccasin, for 
 instance grow like common plants in the ground. 
 
 It would almost seem as if the orchids had an 
 eye to business in their imitation of insects. At 
 any rate, there seems to be a very good under- 
 standing between them, and constant business re- 
 lations are kept up. The flowers always have a 
 little pouch somewhere about them in which they 
 keep a stock of honey on hand. Their beautiful 
 colors and delicious smell attract, by day and 
 night, bees, butterflies, and moths. In return for 
 the "treat" which the flowers give, the insects 
 render a valuable service to the plants. 
 
 I must remind you of something we have looked 
 into before, and that is that every perfect seed is 
 the result of a partnership entered into by the 
 pollen grains or " whips" and the ovules of a plant. 
 The pollen is the yellow dust which it is so easy 
 to see on lilies and some other flowers; it is to 
 flowering plants what the whips are in mosses 
 
Flowers in Fancy Dress. 149 
 
 and ferns. The ovules are little round bodies 
 lying in the swollen part of a flower where it 
 joins the stem. Above the ovules, and connected 
 with them, is the pistil, sometimes standing up in 
 the midst of the stamens which make the centre 
 of most flowers, sometimes it is only a sticky lit- 
 tle pad, as it is in the orchids. Some plants get 
 along perfectly well if this partnership is entirely 
 a family affair, and the pollen of a flower falls on 
 its own pistil, and makes a union with its own 
 ovules ; but this is not always the case. Certain 
 plants require that the pollen shall be from anoth- 
 er plant if the seed is to be sound and healthy. 
 Orchids require this cross -fertilization, as it is 
 called, and without the help of insects it could 
 not be effected. 
 
 Bees and other flying visitors, it is found, al- 
 ways go in a single excursion from one flower 
 of a kind to another of the same kind. They do 
 not mix their drinks. This instinct not only 
 serves to keep the honey stored by the bees pure, 
 
150 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 but it enables the insects to carry the pollen just 
 where it will be useful. The pollen of a morning, 
 glory would die if put on the rose pistil. It must 
 be placed on a flower of the same family as the 
 one it came from, or one very nearly related to it, 
 or it will do no good. 
 
 Now look at Fig. 60 and you will see that the 
 flowers have a hollow tube in the centre, with a 
 projecting lower lip. This tube is a single leaf or 
 petal curled over to make a tunnel, and through 
 this tunnel is the only path to the honey pouch. 
 When a butterfly feels like taking a drink, and 
 one of these orchids is near, he lights on the lower 
 lip (Z) of the tube, and pushing his long proboscis, 
 or trunk, through it into the pouch, sucks up the 
 honey. Now look at Fig. 61, A. This is a picture 
 of the tube with its near wall cut away, so that 
 you can see the inside arrangement. As he works 
 his proboscis down into the honey pouch, N, it is 
 pressed against r, and touches a spring there ; the 
 little cap at r snaps open, and leaves a sticky ball 
 
_ a 
 
 FIG. 61. HONEY POUCH AND POLLEN PODS, 
 A, Orchis mascula; B, Dendrobium cut in two. 
 
Flowers in Fancy Dress. 153 
 
 resting on the proboscis. As the butterfly goes 
 on sucking, this ball dries as if it were glued to 
 his trunk. When he draws his head out, this pro- 
 boscis is ornamented with one or two little tufts 
 which look like the trees in a child's toy village, 
 as you will see in the illustration (Fig. 61, 0). 
 
 Now look at the fragment of a flower in the 
 part marked A of the same illustration. Suppose 
 the pollen tuft to stay just where it is when the 
 butterfly comes out of the flower. You can see by 
 looking at the figure that it would strike r in the 
 next flower it entered, and that would do no 
 good: s is the place it should strike; s is the 
 pistil. Now take an orchid flower, if you can get 
 one ; if not, look at Fig. 62, A, and see what will 
 happen. I push into it a sharpened lead-pencil, 
 and it comes out with the pollen tuft standing up 
 as it does on the butterfly's trunk. Watch it a 
 minute. As it dries, the stem of the tuft bends 
 down towards the point of the pencil. Now push 
 it into another flower. Wait a little while a 
 
154 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 minute perhaps and take the pencil out. You 
 will see that the pollen has been pulled out of its 
 little case. If you tear open the flower, you will 
 find the pollen sticking so tight on the pistil, s, 
 that you can scarcely brush it off. In this upper 
 flower the drawing is from Mr. Darwin's book, 
 but the lower one is one of the flowers in Fig. 60 
 
 FIG. 62. PENCIL AND NEEDLE, WITH POLLEN. 
 
 which I picked off the plant after drawing it, and 
 tried with a pencil myself, r in the lower draw- 
 ing looks like a little purple velvet pouch swung 
 lightly on its stalk. The pencil came out, leaving 
 the little bag empty, and the pollen glued fast to 
 
flowers ^n Fancy 
 
 55 
 
 its side. But they were not glued so fast that 
 they were not pulled off by the next flower that 
 the pencil entered. 
 
 Some of the orchids have two pistils, one on 
 each side. In these, if you push into the tube a 
 bristle or needle, the two pollen cases come out as 
 in Fig. 62, J3; as they dry, they spread apart, and 
 
 FIG. 63. BUTTERFLY'S PRO- 
 BOSCIS, WITH POLLEN. 
 
 a a, double pollen-pods, glued on. 
 
 bend forward so that both pistils are struck at 
 once as it is pushed into the next blossom. The 
 contrivances by which each orchid receives on 
 just the right spot exactly the right pollen are 
 
156 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 perfectly marvellous. I have only told you a 
 very few of the simplest facts in regard to the 
 help the insects give to the flowers. Many a poor 
 butterfly goes through life having its proboscis 
 loaded down with the glued-on pollen cases (Fig. 
 63, a a). It is one of those business arrangements 
 which does not work equally well for both parties. 
 All this is beautiful for the flowers, but it seems 
 rather hard on the butterflies. 
 
"Picciola." 157 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 "PICCIOLA." 
 
 THERE is a beautiful little French story which 
 has been translated into English and called 
 " Picciola," the Italian for little flower. It is the 
 story i)f a French nobleman who was thrown into 
 prison on an unjust charge of plotting against 
 the government of his country. He was a man 
 of talent and education, as well as of wealth and 
 position. Somehow, with all his life had given 
 him, it had never taught him to look with open 
 eyes at nature, or to see beyond nature a God 
 who had created it. 
 
 He was restless and impatient in his close cell 
 and the little strip of court-yard where he paced 
 up and down, and up and down, in his misery, 
 longing to be free. One day he saw between 
 
158 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 the heavy paving - stones of the yard the earth 
 raised up into a tiny mound. His heart bound- 
 ed at the thought that some of his friends were 
 digging up from below to reach him and give 
 him his liberty again. 
 
 But when he came to examine the spot closely 
 he found it was only a little plant pushing the 
 earth before it in its effort to reach the light and 
 the air. With the bitter sense of disappointment 
 which this discovery brought, he was about to 
 crush the little intruder with his foot, and then 
 a feeling of compassion stopped him, and its life 
 was spared. 
 
 The plant grew and throve in its prison, and 
 the Count de Charney became every day fonder 
 of his fellow-prisoner ; he spent hours, which had 
 before been empty, watching it as it grew and 
 developed, until it became the absorbing interest 
 of his life. As he watched it day by day, and 
 saw the contrivances by which it managed to live 
 and grow, he was compelled to believe that there 
 
"Picciola." 159 
 
 must be, somewhere, a great and wonderful power 
 that could design and make so marvellous a thing. 
 The little flower was like a little child taking 
 him by the hand, and leading him away from his 
 dark, bitter, unbelieving thoughts into the light 
 of God's love. 
 
 I want to take some common flower, some- 
 thing you have seen a hundred times every sum- 
 mer of your lives, and show you a few of the 
 marvellous contrivances that make it able to live 
 and grow and bear blossoms and fruit. If you 
 will study them closely for a while, it will not 
 seem so strange then that the Count de Charney, 
 who had lived so many years without learning 
 anything of the wonders of nature, should have 
 had them opened for him by one little flower 
 that he had carefully watched and studied. 
 
 Most plants higher than the ferns are alike in 
 having roots, stems, and leaves, and some sort of 
 flower and seed-vessel. But the parts look so 
 very different in different plants that it is some- 
 
160 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 times a little hard to tell which is which. In 
 some the roots grow in the air, and in others the 
 stems grow underground. It is only by studying 
 what the parts do that it is possible to be sure 
 what they are. The most important part of every 
 living thing is its stomach, because everything 
 that lives must eat and drink, or die. There are 
 some very curious plants which have regular 
 stomachs into which their food goes, just as it 
 does in an animal, and is digested, but these are 
 not very common. After a while we will come 
 to these strange plants, which I have called veg- 
 etable pitchers and queer traps. Ordinary plants 
 have roots to supply them with food and water 
 in the place of a stomach. 
 
 Let us study the roots of some plant. Any or- 
 dinary plant will do. If you can do so, get a hya- 
 cinth glass and bulb. The bulb is the root, and 
 looks very much like an onion ; the glass is a vase 
 made for the purpose of growing hyacinths in 
 water. It slopes in from the bottom upward. 
 
and then bulges out suddenly. The bulb rests 
 in this bulging part, and has water below it and 
 around its lower part. The glass being clear, you 
 can see the roots grow as plainly as you can see 
 a leaf or a flower-bud unfold. Perhaps you have 
 no hyacinth glass, and cannot get one ; then try 
 to make one for yourself out of a small glass jar. 
 There will certainly be a pickle bottle or a pre- 
 serve jar about the house which will answer per- 
 fectly well. All you want is to have the bulb 
 rest half in and half out of the water, with room 
 below for the roots to spread through the water. 
 Be careful to keep the water up to the right mark 
 by adding a little every day as the plant soaks 
 it up. 
 
 Or you may take a dozen grains of seed corn, 
 soak them overnight, and then plant them an 
 inch deep in a box, having about six inches or 
 more depth of good earth. In about three days 
 the blade will come above ground. Put your 
 hand or a trowel down beside one of the plants, 
 
 11 
 
162 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 and scoop it gently up. Be sure you make your 
 hand or trowel go away down below where the 
 seed was planted, so as not to bruise the tender 
 
 growth. Shake 
 and blow the dust 
 away, and you 
 will see several 
 little white thread- 
 like roots coming 
 from the grain. If 
 you take up in 
 this way all the 
 young plants, one 
 or two every day, 
 you will see how 
 they sprout and 
 grow. 
 
 If you have a 
 microscope and a 
 
 (1) Corn four days planted; r, r, r, roots; 
 
 leaf; a, grain of corn. (2) Root magni- sharp knife, Care- 
 er! ! f,. root fnn : n. p-rowinp- noint. 
 
 fully split the end 
 
 FIG. 64. CORN AND MAGNIFIED ROOT. 
 
 fied ; c, root cap ; g, growing 
 (Zea mais.) 
 
 point. 
 
" Picciola" 163 
 
 of one of these roots and look at it. If you have 
 not, you will have to trust me so far as to take this 
 drawing as correct (Fig. 64). All these tiny roots 
 have a cap over their growing end, so that when 
 they have to push their way among the hard 
 earth and stones, the growing part will not get 
 
 bruised. These roots take in all the water and 
 
 
 
 the food which the earth supplies to the plant. 
 
 The hyacinth can grow in water alone, because 
 it has been a provident little body, and has stored 
 away enough food in the little round carpet-bag 
 of a bulb to supply the plant for the few weeks 
 of its life. It only asks for the water it needs to 
 keep it alive and growing. When the thirsty 
 little roots have sucked up water enough, the 
 bulb begins to grow in the other direction. If 
 you look, you will see a solid lump of pale green 
 come up from the top like the horns of a calf, or 
 a baby's tooth. This is the young plant coming 
 up out of its dark cradle into the light and air 
 and sunshine. The delicate growing end of the 
 
164 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 plant, which will after a while bear its beautiful 
 spike of bells, is very tenderly wrapped up in the 
 leaves. After it gets through the tough skin of 
 the bulb, the plant grows straight up. It stretches 
 itself after its long sleep in the sweet air and 
 light, the leaves lengthen and broaden and open 
 out, and the stem with its little knobby buds 
 conies up in the midst. These will soon grow 
 and unfold into beauty and fragrance, now you 
 will be rewarded for all your long waiting, if 
 watching the wonderful growth day by day has 
 not carried its own reward with it. 
 
 Many plants are grown from roots or bulbs, 
 but a greater majority by far come from seed. 
 Tulips and lilies, onions and potatoes, are all in- 
 stances of plants grown from new roots which 
 sprout out from the old ones. The root is in 
 every case the beginning, the seed the ending, of 
 the life of a plant. 
 
 Take two of the commonest of our window and 
 garden plants the geranium and the heart's- 
 
"Picciola." 
 
 165 
 
 ease. Let us take the geranium first. On the 
 cluster of bloom we will probably find flowers 
 partly withered, flowers full - blown, and buds 
 
 FIG. 65. GERANIUM PISTIL. 
 
 (1) p, lily pistil; b, b, pollen grains; c, where cut was made across. 
 
 (2) c, the cut piece showing ovules ; o, ovule. 
 
 (Pelargonium.) 
 
 nearly ready to open. Look at a full-blown 
 flower. You will see with your naked eye some- 
 thing standing up in the middle which looks like 
 
166 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 a tiny pink lily ; around it are little rounded 
 white spikes. If you carefully strip off the green 
 cap outside, and then the colored petals, you will 
 find a lily like the one in the figure (Fig. 65) ; 
 
 this is called the pistil. 
 Now open one of the 
 nearly blown buds; you 
 will find the lily pistil 
 still closed, and on two of 
 the spikes around it two 
 double-barrelled rosy 
 pods. When the pods, or 
 stamens, are nearly ripe, 
 they look for all the world 
 
 STAMEN Hke a P lnk gum-drop 
 
 made in the shape of a 
 
 (1) a. stamen with pods burst -^ , -., -rr ,-1 
 
 open; 6, 6, poiien grains. (2) French roll. If they are 
 
 &, 6, 6, pollen grain much en- ,1 11 
 
 larged ripe they look as you see 
 
 (Pelargonium.) in Fig. 66. 
 
 To make a perfect seed the pollen and ovule 
 have to enter into partnership. The stamen 
 
 AND POLLEN GRAINS. 
 
"Picciola." 16? 
 
 sends out thousands of clear orange pollen grains 
 (Fig. 66, &), and when these fall on the top of 
 the lily or pistil, as some have done in Fig. 65, 
 they stick fast. The lily, for all its innocent look, 
 has laid a trap for them; it is covered with a 
 sticky substance which holds them fast. The tiny 
 pollen grain begins to send out a tube like a little 
 hose -pipe, which grows down and down to the 
 bottom of the lily. There it finds some very 
 small. egg-shaped bodies called ovules (Fig. 65, o). 
 The busy little hose-pipe pushes its way into a 
 little opening at the end of one of the ovules, 
 pumps away till the pollen grain is empty, and 
 the liquid out of it is all safely stored in the 
 ovule, and then it withers away. The ovule when 
 it is ripe is a seed, but if the pollen has not 
 emptied itself in the way just described, the 
 ovule dies. 
 
 One of the most curious plants we have, in 
 some respects, is our common corn Indian corn. 
 When it is " in tassel,' 1 at the top of the stalk is a 
 
168 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 great bunch of dull-colored flowers. If you look 
 carefully at them you will find that each is a 
 leafy case, and out of this, like the clapper of a 
 bell, hang several pods. When the pods are ripe, 
 out of an opening at the lower end pours a cloud 
 of pollen, which fills the air around the corn- 
 stalk. We have seen how carefully the pollen is 
 guided to the pistil in orchids, the methods used 
 to make sure the meeting and combining of the 
 two cells, the pollen, or whip, and the ovule, be- 
 ing very wonderful and various. In some plants, 
 like the corn for instance, it is left a ^ood deal to 
 
 / o 
 
 chance the wind blows the pollen about but 
 to prevent failure millions of pollen grains are 
 grown and dispersed, with the chance of one here 
 and there reaching the pistil. In the corn the 
 pistil is in a very queer place. I am sure you 
 must have seen the cook pulling off the green 
 leaves or husks from an ear of green corn, or 
 perhaps you have done it yourself. Out of the 
 little end of the husks hangs a bunch of fine 
 
" Picciola" 169 
 
 silky threads. Each one of these threads is a 
 pistil; it is a hollow tube, and terminates at its 
 farther end in a little sac holding an ovule it is 
 like the bottles in the liverworts and mosses, only 
 it has a tiny little body and a long, long neck. 
 
 It seems hardly possible, and yet it is true, that 
 eveiy single grain of corn that ever grew was 
 made by a partnership between a pollen grain 
 from the top of the corn-stalk, and this little, 
 buried, wrapped-up ovule, down deep under the 
 green leaves of the corn -husk. How do you 
 think the pollen ever gets at the ovule ? It has 
 not the power of whipping around and making 
 its way down these tubes. A little pollen grain 
 blowing about in the air, is blown against a 
 thread of corn -silk; this, like other pistils, is 
 sticky, and it stays there. Pretty soon the pollen 
 grain pushes out a little nose, as the seed and 
 spores do when they begin to sprout ; this little 
 tube pushes its way down and down, right 
 through the whole long length of the corn-silk. 
 
170 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 It never sets up a single partition wall in all this 
 long distance. After a while the pollen tube 
 finds the ovule down a long passage-way, and 
 then the partnership is formed. 
 
 Every strand of silk on a perfect ear of corn, 
 
 when the grain begins 
 to form, is a double 
 tube one tube the 
 silk, with another, the 
 pollen tube, running 
 its whole length inside 
 it. When the contents 
 of the pollen grain is 
 pumped through this 
 long hose-pipe into the 
 ovule, then, and not till 
 then, the seed corn be- 
 gins to grow. 
 
 The very 
 
 FIG. 67. PISTIL OF HEART'S- 
 
 EASE. 
 
 (1) Side view of pistil sliced in two. 
 &, pollen grains which have found 
 their way in ; o, ovules. (2) Front you Can do SO, examine 
 view of pistil not cut. 
 
 ( Fia tricolor.) an ear of corn carefully. 
 
" Picciola." 1 71 
 
 You will find each thread of silk leads to a single 
 grain. If any place is found on the cob where 
 a grain is wanting, it is because, for some reason 
 or other, no pollen tube ever gained its way to 
 the ovule, and so the ovule withered and died. 
 
 If you look at Fig. 67, you will see the pistil 
 of a pansy, or heart's-ease. No. 1 is a side view 
 of the pistil sliced down so you can see into it, 
 as you can into a baby-house. You see the pol- 
 len grains, , sending down their tubes to the 
 ovules, o. No. 2 in this, drawing is the front 
 view of the heart's-ease pistil. The beautiful 
 colored leaves of a flower are only meant to 
 cover and protect the pistil and the pollen of the 
 plant, as the fruit is meant to cover its seed. 
 There has been a tender care for us in all this 
 that the covering for both should have been 
 made so beautiful and so delicious. 
 
172 Chapters on Pl<mt Life, 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 CLIMBING PLANTS. 
 
 HAVE you never wondered, when you looked 
 at a tangle of grape-vine or morning-glory stems, 
 how they came to twist themselves together so? 
 Perhaps you had some sort of a notion that they 
 got tangled up as a bunch of silk or a skein of 
 worsted lying loose might do. Examine any vine 
 which you can find growing near you, and see how 
 different the tangle is from a snarl of thread : 
 there is a regular twist, the branches coiling in 
 the same direction. In some plants the turn is 
 from right to left, in others from left to right. 
 
 There must, of course, be some reason for this, 
 and we can best find it out by taking a young 
 plant, a seedling, and watching what it does from 
 the start. 
 
Climbing Plants. 173 
 
 It would be very natural to think that plants 
 moved only as stones do, because something pulled 
 or pushed them ; but this would not be a true 
 conclusion. Every plant that we know much 
 about is firmly fastened by its root in the ground ; 
 the movements of its leaves and flowers seem 
 only caused by the blowing of the wind or the 
 beating of the rain. But though plants are an- 
 chored fast to the earth, they are all the while 
 moving as they grow. 
 
 Take some seed beans will do and after 
 soaking them, plant them in the ground about 
 two inches deep. In a week or ten days you will 
 see the earth cracked all about. This is not 
 merely because the growing plant acts like a 
 wedge and splits the earth open, but because in 
 growing the first little leaves move round and 
 round, boring their way out of the ground very 
 much as a corkscrew works its way into a cork, 
 and cracks the earth around it. The first leaves 
 of most plants a bean, for instance do not come 
 
174 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 straight up out of the seed ; but when the seed 
 coat bursts from the swelling of the inner part a 
 
 J 
 
 r 
 
 FIG. 68. THE BEAN. FIRST LEAVES IN DIFFERENT STAGE& 
 
 little arch projects, which raises itself up. This 
 arch is the stem, and after a .while the leaves are 
 pulled out of the sheath, and the arch widens out, 
 
Climbing Plants. 175 
 
 and finally straightens up. You have often seen 
 a man who had a heavy weight to lift bow him- 
 self over and receive the weight, and then lift it 
 by straightening himself, as the stem does to lift 
 the leaves (Fig. 68, first leaves). The root bur- 
 rows into the earth in very 
 much the same way as the 
 stem revolves, by going 
 around and around as it 
 grows (Fig. 69). Take a 
 
 FIG. 69. MOVEMENT OP 
 morning-glory vine, and let ROOT OF BLACK BEAN. 
 
 it lie without any wire or 
 
 trellis to catch hold of. After 
 
 a while you will find the stems and tendrils 
 
 coiled round each other in a tight twist (Fig. 70) ; 
 
 you could not begin to twist them so tightly 
 
 yourself without breaking the stem. 
 
 The tips of all growing plants, like the first 
 leaves that pierce the ground, move around ; they 
 are forever weaving their magic circles in the air; 
 they take many hours sometimes to make a single 
 
176 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 turn, but they are as regular as the hands of a 
 clock, and never forget and go backward. I have 
 been watching some wistaria branches lately, and 
 
 FIG. 70. MORNING-GLORIES. 
 
 (Convolvulus. ) 
 
 have been very much interested to see the new 
 shoots, as they grew rapidly in the soft warm 
 air, taking a slow turn around the wire placed 
 
Climbing Plcvnts. 
 
 to support them, very much as 
 
 your arm about a swing -rope to 
 
 hold. If there is a post or a wire near, you do 
 
 not have to give your vines the twist they need 
 
 to climb ; they do their own twisting as they 
 
 grow, and always in this quiet, deliberate way. 
 
 You have no doubt noticed 
 that a Virginia creeper does not 
 need a wire to climb by; it 
 grows beautifully up any wall 
 which has little unevennesses. 
 Now look, if you can get hold 
 of a new shoot, what the creeper 
 has to help it along. It sends 
 out tendrils that branch into 
 many ends, and each one of 
 these ends swells and becomes 
 a sort of sticky pad, which glues 
 itself to the wall (Fig. 71). 
 These little pads, when they find no wall to fasten 
 themselves upon, remain small, and finally wither 
 
 12 
 
 FIG. 71. VIRGINIA 
 
 CREEPER. 
 
 (Ampelopsis.) 
 
178 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 away. Those on the spray in Fig. 71, which was 
 trailing from a vine, are so, some small and some 
 quite gone ; but look at the pads in Fig. 72, which 
 were detached from a painted board, and see how 
 they look through the microscope. 
 Very much like a boy's India-rub- 
 ber sucker, are not they ? Some 
 of these have the paint from the 
 board still sticking fast on them; 
 others are all sparkling with the 
 dried mucilage, which makes them 
 look as if they had been sprinkled 
 with sugar. 
 
 These little many-armed suckers give the plant 
 a firm hold, while its head waves around until it 
 touches some surface again, and again the pads 
 lay hold for another upward stretch. 
 
 There must be some curious arrangement by 
 which plants, that cannot /M and will as animals 
 do, can move. They have no brains to think with, 
 no nerves to feel with : it is strange to believe 
 
 FIG. 72. PADS 
 THROUGH THE 
 MICROSCOPE. 
 
 (Ampelopsis.) 
 
Climbing Plants. 179 
 
 tLat they really do move with a reason. Mr, 
 Darwin has examined the subject so closely that 
 he has taken nearly six hundred good-sized pages 
 to tell all he has found out about it. His ways 
 of finding out are many. One method is this : he 
 takes a small stiff bristle and glues it on the 
 growing part of a shoot. By watching this shoot 
 and comparing it w T ith other shoots which had no 
 bristle attached, he could not detect any difference 
 in the movements. Above the little branch with 
 the bristle attached he placed a piece of glass 
 that had been smoked, so that the bristle, as it 
 moved with the movement of the tip, would travel 
 over the glass. He did not need to stand by and 
 watch the branch ; he could go away and attend 
 to anything he chose, and when he came back 
 there on the glass was a history of the travels the 
 shoot had made, written by itself. He managed 
 to hang up a sprouting beau or pea, so that the 
 root recorded its own movements in the same 
 way. There were other ways which he used, all 
 
180 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 of them being ingenious, and requiring the great- 
 est attention to get a correct map of their move- 
 ments. He found that every plant in growing 
 moved around as well as upward, but that some 
 moved far more than others : the ones that grew 
 tall and slender and needed support would send 
 out shoots that swayed round in bigger and bigger 
 circles until they could reach something to sustain 
 themselves by, or else they would fall in helpless 
 heaps on the ground. 
 
 Mr. Darwin was not a man to be satisfied with 
 finding that a thing is so. He never rested until 
 he found just how it came about. I do not mean 
 to say that he was the only man who studied 
 these things, for there were many others who did ; 
 but he wrote about what he had studied in such 
 a clear and simple and interesting way that any- 
 body could understand him, and so people who 
 don't pretend to be very wise in such matters 
 read Mr. Darwin's account and nobody's else; 
 and are apt to forget, though he is always careful 
 
Climbing Plants. 
 
 181 
 
 to mention their names and what they have done, 
 that any one else deserves any of the credit. 
 
 By closely studying the little cells of which the 
 leaf or stem is made up, he found that when, for 
 any reason, a plant needed to turn in a certain 
 direction, the water in 
 the stem rushed from 
 the inner to the outer 
 part of the curve, mak- 
 ing the cells on the 
 inner side of the stem 
 a little smaller, and 
 those on the outer a 
 little larger, than usu- 
 al. After a while the 
 stretching of the outer 
 cells makes them grow and stay larger (see in the 
 figure how it must be, Fig. 73), and so the curve 
 remains. You cannot straighten a stem curved 
 in this way without breaking it. 
 
 Every movement of stems and leaves comes 
 
 FIG. 73. DIAGRAM OF STRAIGHT 
 
 AND CURVED STEMS. 
 a, stretched cells ; &, crowded cells. 
 
182 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 from the movement of the water that fills their 
 cells. But besides the water, there is something 
 else just as important, and that is the sun. The 
 water is only a servant, which obeys the light as 
 its master. Many flowers turn their bright faces 
 always to the light. They follow the sun as he 
 moves through the heavens all the day long 
 from his rising to his setting. This comes from 
 the effect the sun has on the water in the stem, 
 and not because the flower is beginning to " take 
 notice," as the baby's bright eyes do of a lamp 
 when it is moved about a room, though it does 
 remind one of it. 
 
 The movement of climbing plants is only one 
 of many curious movements that are made by 
 stems and roots and leaves and flowers, though 
 the cause is the same in all cases. 
 
Vegetable Pitchers. 133 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 VEGETABLE PITCHERS. 
 
 NEARLY seventy years ago a gentleman living 
 in North Carolina began to watch some very cu- 
 rious plants which he found growing in a poor 
 piece of land near his home. Hundreds of peo- 
 ple had probably seen these plants, but Dr. 
 McBride seems to have been the first who really 
 studied them and wrote down what he found 
 out about their ways. 
 
 Out of the moist ground a tuft of leaves grew ; 
 some of these were ordinary leaves, others were 
 extraordinary. To examine the last you might 
 almost think that the fairies had been up very 
 early in the morning with their thimbles and 
 needles and invisible silk, and had selected a leaf 
 here and there in the tuft, and doubled it around, 
 
184 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 and sewed the edges to- 
 gether, so as to make a long 
 slender pitcher to catch the 
 summer rain in. If the fair- 
 ies were responsible for 
 these pitchers, they must be 
 very good seamstresses in- 
 deed, for such a seam you 
 never saw. You may look 
 at it through the largest 
 kind of a magnifying - glass, 
 and not a stitch can be seen, 
 not a knot nor a loose thread. 
 The raw edge of the seam 
 is always turned outward. 
 Look at Fig. 74. Here is a 
 single pitcher which grew 
 
 FIG. 74. OPEN-MOUTHED not far from New York City, 
 in a SWampy place. Any 
 
 fine da y in Ma y y u wil1 be 
 
 (Sarracenia purpurea.) pretty SUl'e to find SOine of 
 
 /, seam, wUh^ney trail; 
 
 ' part; ht hood; 
 
Vegetable Pitchers. 
 
 185 
 
 these pitchers for sale at 
 the small stalls on Four- 
 teenth Street, between Fifth 
 and Sixth avenues, if you 
 happen to be in New York, 
 and are on the lookout for 
 them (/ is the seam and p 
 the pitcher). Above the 
 pitcher you see a curved 
 and veined leaf, A, which 
 stands up and partly curves 
 over the open mouth, m. It 
 does not quite cover it, so 
 some rain usually gets into 
 the hollow tube. 
 
 These curious trumpet- 
 shaped leaves are not srrown 
 
 FIG. 75. PITCHER WITH 
 
 for the benefit of the fair- OVERHANGING HOOD AND 
 f, CLEAR WINDOWS. 
 
 ies, nor even for the beetles s , hood . w>windows;/)hon . 
 and flies which often pack e y trail ; c > cord around 
 
 mouth ; m, mouth. 
 the lower part Of the tube (Sarracenia varwlaris.) 
 
186 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 full, but are for the use of the plant on which 
 they grow. I have never found insect remains 
 in the pitcher you have first been looking at, 
 but in Fig. 75 I have taken out hundreds, some- 
 times packing the tube up for four inches or 
 more. These trumpets are the stomachs of the 
 plant; the flies and insects in the trumpets are 
 the remains of many dinners those parts of the 
 insects which they could not digest. 
 
 Plants usually, as we have found out, feed by 
 means of their roots. The food they get is in the 
 ground, and the roots push down into this, and 
 suck up out of it what they need to keep them 
 alive and make them grow. The pitcher-plants 
 live in very poor soil, where they can find very 
 little to nourish them. They get little besides 
 water through their roots. They would die, just 
 as you or I would, if they had nothing but water 
 to live on, so they are provided with these stom- 
 ach-pitchers. 
 
 Before you eat your food some one has to get 
 
Vegetable Pitchers. 187 
 
 it and cook it; then you have to chew it and 
 swallow it. If these plants had one -half of all 
 this to do to get fed, there would be none of 
 them on the earth now; they would all have died 
 out long ago. But these pitchers, besides being 
 stomachs to digest the food, are traps to catch it. 
 Along the edge of the raw seam (/, Figs. 74 and 
 75) are rows of honey glands, so that from the 
 ground to the edge of the pitcher's brim there is 
 a trail with honey drops leading a careless insect 
 on and on, and up over the edge, , into the hol- 
 low of the trap. Once inside, there is no hope 
 for him, for the inner part is covered with deli- 
 cate hairs pointing downward towards the pit 
 below. An ant, a fly, and many another insect 
 can walk straight up a pane of glass, or on the 
 smoothest ceiling, and yet it will go reeling and 
 tumbling along on this hairy floor. The sticky 
 pad it has on its feet, its claws, and even the pat- 
 ent little sucker which aids some of them in hold- 
 ing on, all go for nothing when it undertakes to 
 
188 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 stroll on this bending, moving, uncertain wall 
 inside the pitcher's brim. In a second the un- 
 wary visitor slips and falls, no matter how hard 
 he tries to save himself. Even with the advan- 
 tage of wings an insect seldom escapes, but soon 
 forms part of the liquid mass filling the lower 
 part of the pitcher a horrible mixture, part wa- 
 ter, part a juice which oozes out of the trumpet- 
 leaf, and part dead and decaying insects. 
 
 There is something very horrible in the idea of 
 a plant, a beautiful plant, too, luring insects to its 
 trap, and then feeding on them like a dreadful old 
 ogre. In one or two of the pitcher- plants at the 
 upper end are clear spots which let in the light. 
 Against these skylights the trapped flies strike 
 and bump, as they do against a window-pane, till 
 they fall into the pit below (w, Fig. 75). This 
 pitcher-plant, as well as that shown in Fig. 76, is 
 rich with beautiful colors, red and yellow and 
 olive green, with clear pale yellow transparent 
 windows, and above the cluster of these leaves 
 
Vegetable Pitchers. 
 
 grow the stems which 
 bear their flowers. 
 
 One of the most beau- 
 tiful of these plants grows 
 in the Sierra Nevada 
 Mountains, in Northern 
 California, so high that 
 the flower may be found 
 blooming higher up than 
 the top of Mount Wash- 
 ington or any mountain 
 east of the Mississippi 
 River. It is too high up 
 in the world to have any 
 every -day name, but is 
 called, in part after its na- 
 tive State, Darlingtonia 
 calif ornica. This has no 
 common leaves at all, but 
 
 from the root Spring two FlG - 76. -PITCHER-PLANT IN 
 
 BLOOM. 
 kinds Of pitchers little (Sarracenia rubra.) 
 
190 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 baby pitchers, something like those in Fig. 76, 
 and others, large, beautifully col- 
 ored and veined pitchers, with a 
 curved -over roof and two long 
 flaring wings (Fig. 77, Darlingto- 
 nia calif ornica). 
 
 Every one of these pitchers is 
 twisted round about half a turn. 
 The colors are like those of rich 
 ripe fruit brilliant reds and yel- 
 lows and greens; not 
 brighter than those of 
 the other pitcher-plants, 
 but richer and mellow- 
 er. The flower of this, 
 too, is very curious. It 
 grows on a tall stem 
 four or five feet high, 
 and looks like a rich 
 
 FIG. 77.- 
 
 CALI- 
 
 FORNICA. 
 
 tulip hanging down, 
 
Vegetable Pitchers. 
 
 191 
 
 FIG. 78. BLADDER-WORT. 
 (Utricularia.) 
 
 but with an extra row of 
 petals above. The flower 
 is arranged as a trap too. 
 It, like the orchid traps, 
 draws the insects flying 
 about to itself, and by feed- 
 ing them with honey in- 
 duces them to carry the pol- 
 len of the flower to the 
 sticky place where the pollen dust must rest to 
 make the flower bear seed. Then it is hard to 
 think of this beautiful plant without feeling that 
 
 it is a traitor it lures 
 the insects to its pitch- 
 ers and devours them. 
 There are many other 
 plants which devour 
 insects as the vegetable 
 pitchers do. Among 
 them are some very 
 
 FIG. 79. BLADDER WITH CAPT- . .. _ . . 
 
 PREY. curious little things 
 
192 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 that grow sometimes in water, sometimes in the 
 air, and occasionally in the earth. The English 
 people call them bladder-worts, because on the 
 stems or roots or leaves little tiny cups grow, 
 which were formerly supposed to be useful as 
 bladders to float the plants. Closer study of 
 them has shown these to be traps too. One 
 of the most curious of these traps may be seen in 
 Fig. 78. 
 
 The plant you see here is one which has no 
 leaves, only branching stems. This is one of the 
 kind that live in water. It goes floating around, 
 looking like the most innocent of plants, until 
 some unwary animal comes near the mouth of 
 one of the bladders (Fig. 79). In a minute the 
 mouth or trap- door opens, the victim is gulped 
 down, and slowly dissolved and absorbed. In- 
 side the stomach you will see a quantity of little 
 irregular stars with four rays. These are the 
 organs that take up the nourishment which the 
 unfortunate prey supplies. 
 
Some Queer Traps. 193 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 SOME QUEER TRAPS. 
 
 I WANT to take you with me some bright sum- 
 mer day on a little visit to the boggy lands of 
 southern New Jersey. Close beside a cranberry 
 patch let us stop and look at this great bed of 
 wild flowers. The ground is covered as thick as 
 they can stand with spikes of delicate rosy flow- 
 ers and long narrow green leaves, sparkling in 
 the sunshine as though they were set with mill- 
 ions of bright jewels. These cannot be rain-drops, 
 for it has not rained for a week, nor dew-drops, 
 for the sun is high, and the dew would have been 
 dried up long ago. Look close, and you will see 
 that each narrow leaf is covered with tiny stalks, 
 each tipped with a bright drop of what looks like 
 dew. Touch it, and you will find the drop to be 
 
 16 
 
194 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 sticky. The sun, which dries common dew or 
 rain drops, draws out this sticky substance. From 
 
 this fact the plant is 
 commonly called sun- 
 dew (Fig. 80). 
 
 The sun-dew in the 
 picture is not the one 
 we have just found grow- 
 ing, but belongs to the 
 same family. The prin- 
 cipal difference between 
 them is that it has round 
 green leaves instead of 
 long narrow ones; but 
 what is* true of one is 
 equally true of the other, 
 so far as its general be- 
 havior is concerned. 
 
 ^ had long been 
 known that the sticky 
 
 FIG, 80. SUN-DEW PLANT. 
 
 drops on the sun -dew 
 
Some Queer Traps. 195 
 
 leaves served as a trap to catch insects, but it was 
 not fully known why the insects were so caught 
 and how they were disposed of until Mr. Darwin 
 began to watch them and study their ways. If 
 anybody in the world could get the truth out of 
 a plant or animal, Mr. Darwin was the man. He 
 tried a thousand ingenious ways of cross -ques- 
 tioning them by tests and experiments. There 
 are few more interesting stories than that told us 
 about the ways of the flesh-eating plants. The 
 sun-dew is one of these; the insects it captures 
 are for food. 
 
 Look at this leaf, which was picked from a sun- 
 dew plant and looked at through a magnify ing- 
 glass (Fig. 81). It is somewhat the shape of a 
 palm-leaf fan, fringed around the edge, and covered 
 over the upper surface with strange prolongations. 
 These are called tentacles, because they are some- 
 thing like the arms of some sorts of sea animals, 
 with which they capture their prey. The leaf is 
 not perfectly flat, but, as you can see by looking 
 
196 
 
 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 at Fig. 80, it sags a little in the middle, making 
 it slightly cup-shaped. 
 
 FIG. 81. SUN-DEW LEAF MAGNIFIED, SHOWING TENTACLES. 
 
 (Drosera leaf.) 
 
 For some reason insects seem to be very fond 
 of flying around the sun-dew plants, and sooner 
 
Some Queer Traps. 197 
 
 or later they are pretty sure to brush their gauzy 
 wings against a leaf or light upon one. Then 
 there is no hope for them; they stick fast, just as 
 unfortunate flies stick to the fly-paper spread open 
 to catch them. 
 
 Watch that happy little fly sipping honey from 
 one flower after another. Now see him settle down 
 right on the middle of one of the sparkling, harm- 
 less-looking leaves. He is caught. No struggles 
 will loosen the poor little feet glued fast by the 
 sticky drop on the tentacle. His struggles to free 
 himself are only making his capture more certain. 
 The touch of his feet, light as it is, is like the 
 touch of a telegraph operator's finger upon his 
 instrument. The fly sends not one message by 
 his touch, but hundreds one to every tentacle 
 on the leaf, telling it to come to the central office 
 and get its share of the booty captured. In re- 
 sponse every tentacle begins to curve over to the 
 middle of the leaf, until at last the miserable fly 
 is caught in a hundred arms. 
 
198 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 The message goes slowly, and the movement 
 of the tentacles is slower still so slow that it 
 takes from one to five hours for the movement to 
 cease after the insect is caught. When the fly 
 alights on the side of the leaf, or anywhere away 
 from the middle, the tentacle it touches bends 
 over, carrying its prey with it, to the centre of 
 the leaf, and then the arms all begin to move 
 towards the middle and clasp it. Sometimes, 
 when the insect is not on a long tentacle, and so 
 cannot be carried to the middle, only the arms on 
 that side clasp it. 
 
 But the most curious part is not the catching 
 of the fly. Many other kinds of sticky leaves 
 and buds catch flies; the sun-dew devours them. 
 The leaf acts precisely as your stomach does after 
 you have been eating; it pours over the insect a 
 liquid acid which dissolves what is good for food. 
 This dissolved food causes the flow of another 
 liquid, called the gastric juice. In your stomach 
 the gastric juice has the power of turning the food 
 
Some Queer Traps. 199 
 
 you have swallowed into blood, which makes 
 flesh and bones ; it, in fact, builds up your body 
 day by day, and makes you live and grow. The 
 gastric juice of the sun-dew builds up its body in 
 the same way, only instead of blood and flesh it 
 makes sap and cells. 
 
 If you want to keep well, you must eat the 
 right sort of food, and so must the sun-dew. One 
 poor little plant that Mr. Darwin was experiment- 
 ing upon turned yellow and sick, and finally died 
 of dyspepsia, after having been fed for a long 
 time on nothing but cheese. 
 
 One full meal lasts a sun-dew leaf a good while, 
 usually nearly a week. After a fly, or a bit of 
 meat, or anything proper in the way of food, has 
 been seized and digested, the tentacles slowly 
 open out. That means that it is hungry again, 
 and ready for another meal. 
 
 Of course when the plants grow wild they have 
 to depend, like other savages, upon the prey they 
 capture, and often they must go hungry. In try- 
 
200 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 ing to find out all about these curious plants they 
 have been fed with all sorts of things meat and 
 milk, and different kinds of soup. When a few 
 drops of milk are poured on a leaf it will very 
 often curve up around the edges, making the cup 
 deeper, and the tentacles at the same time bend 
 over to get their share. The leaf makes in this 
 way sometimes a round and sometimes a three- 
 cornered cup. One very strange thing has been 
 found out : if a small piece of meat is cut in two, 
 half of it placed on a sun-dew leaf, and the other 
 on some damp moss close by, the meat on the 
 moss spoils, and is filled with living things, like 
 any spoiled meat, but the piece on the leaf stays 
 fresh until it is digested. 
 
 Another plant which lives upon the prey it 
 captures is the Venus's fly-trap (Fig. 82). It 
 grows in great quantities on the poor lands of 
 North Carolina. It has few and small roots like 
 the sun-dew. The leaves grow out from the cen- 
 tre of the plant. From the same place the flower 
 
Some Queer Traps. 
 
 201 
 
 stems and roots also grow, just as is the case in 
 the sun-dew. Only three leaves are given in the 
 picture. The plant usually has from eight to 
 
 FIG. 82. LEAVES OF VENUS'S FLY-TRAP. 
 
 A, A, A, three leaves of Dioneae ; , half the trap, showing sensitive hairs ; 
 
 a, opening and empty ; &, open ; c, closing over fly. 
 
 (Dionece. ) 
 
 twelve ; the flowers are quite large, of a delicate 
 greenish- white. The whole leaf is not a trap, but 
 on the tip of each leaf you see them : b is open ; 
 
202 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 G is closing over a fly which it is about to make a 
 meal of. 
 
 The traps, you see, are a little like the two 
 valves of a clam-shell, hinged together at the back, 
 and edged all around with sharp spikes. On the 
 inner side of each shell are three long hairs ; these 
 hairs (B, Fig. 82) are very sensitive, and the in- 
 stant they are touched the valves close, the spikes 
 locking together as your fingers do when you 
 clasp your hands. If the thing caught in the trap 
 is not fit for food, the valves open before long; 
 but if it is the right sort of food, the spikes stay 
 closely clasped until the food is digested, and 
 then they open and drop out any remains which 
 were of no use to them, such as the horny coat 
 of a beetle, and are ready for another feast. 
 
 One day when I was looking through a fine 
 collection of plants in a greenhouse on Madison 
 Square, New York, I caught sight of a very sin- 
 gular bunch of leaves (Fig. 83). I said to the 
 gardener: "What is that? It is very curious." 
 
Some Queer Traps. 
 
 "Yes," he said, taking the 
 pot up in his hands; "they 
 are queer little fellows, the 
 thirstiest little rascals I ever 
 saw ; can't get enough water 
 anyhow," and he dipped the 
 whole pot into a cask of wa- 
 ter, filling up the pitchers 
 on the ends of the leaves to 
 the brim. The 
 picture (Fig. 83) 
 is taken from a 
 sketch made on 
 the spot. It 
 comes from Aus- 
 tralia, and is still, 
 I believe, very 
 rare; this is the 
 only one I ever 
 saw. Its habits 
 and manners do 
 
 FIG. b3. AUSTRALIAN PITCHER-PLANT 
 (Cephalotm.) 
 
204 Chapters on Plant Life. 
 
 not seem to have been as carefully studied as some 
 of the other flesh-eating plants, but it is a near 
 cousin of the last and most curious of these traps. 
 
 These last of the "queer traps" grow chiefly in 
 the islands of Polynesia. In shape they are some- 
 thing like the vegetable pitchers we saw in the 
 last chapter, but their way of really digesting 
 food shows that they are nearer kin to the sun- 
 dew than to the pitcher-plants. 
 
 The plants are large, with many leaves, the 
 stem, after running through the middle vein of 
 the leaf instead of stopping at the tip, runs right 
 through it, and grows one or more feet beyond 
 the tip of the leaf. On the far end of this stem 
 is a graceful pitcher, with two fringed flaps down 
 the front, and a leaf hinged on for a lid which 
 is sometimes open and sometimes shut (Fig. 84). 
 The pitcher is usually partly filled with a sticky 
 liquid. Some of these pitchers are half a yard high, 
 and would hold quarts and quarts of water. The 
 plant bears great spikes of beautiful flowers, and 
 
Some Queer Traps. 
 
 205 
 
 the pitchers themselves are gorgeous in color 
 
 green and red and pink, with curious markings. 
 The rim around the mouth is beautifully orna- 
 mented, and inside the 
 mouth is a sort of fun- 
 nel of projecting points, 
 leading down to the 
 trap below. You have 
 probably seen the same 
 sort of arrangement in 
 a rat-trap; it is very 
 common. Small birds 
 attracted by the smell 
 or color of the flower, 
 or the hope of a drink 
 from the reservoir be- 
 low, make their way 
 down. It is a trap easy 
 to enter, but hard to 
 escape from in the face 
 of the points. In its 
 
206 ^ft&pters on Plant Life. 
 
 struggle for freedom the poor little fluttering 
 thing gets its wings wet and sticky, and is either 
 drowned at once, or lingers on and is finally di- 
 gested by its beautiful captor. This is turning 
 the tables truly, when vegetables catch and de- 
 vour birds, instead of being destroyed and eaten 
 by them. 
 
 These are perhaps the most w r onderful family 
 of plants that we know anything of. They seem 
 to be leading us away from the vegetable world 
 and to be introducing us to animal manners and 
 customs, and so seem to bring to a natural close 
 our studies in plant life. 
 
 END. 
 
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