of prudence and thoughtfulness has been developed to an extraordinary degree; and these principles had attained their stereotyped perfection ages before the appearance of man upon the earth. There is not a single flowering plant which does not leave a legacy to its descendants, in the store of nutriment associated with its seeds!

The value of such a vegetable fortune varies to a degree almost human. Some have a rich store, like the embryo of the Cocoa-nut, which feeds on the well-known rich white flesh within the shell, until its radicle penetrates one of the three well-known "monkey eyes" at the end. The germ plants of the Beans, Peas, Vetches, Oaks, Hazels, Walnuts, Brazil-nuts, etc., are also rich in a substantial legacy of food-material, carefully hoarded up by the parent plants in the lobes or cotyledons, etc., of the seeds. Even when these lobes are not thick and fleshy as in the Bean and Acorn, they are surrounded by a special provision of albumen and starch foods. Some embryo-plants are well off; others are poor. Those of the Mustard, Cress, Poppy, Nettle, and many other seedling plants, for instance, are provided with so slender a fortune that it is soon exhausted, and the seed-lobes have to develop chlorophyll and become green, as we see them when we SOW our Mustard-and-cress on damped flannel. If the seedlobes did not immediately turn to and work like fully developed ordinary leaves, the embryos of such

plants would inevitably die, and the species would become extinct. In comparison with the abundant way the young plants of the Oak, etc., are supplied with materials to support them until such time as the radicle can absorb its own mineral food from the soil, and the first leaves of the plumule expand to feed on the carbonic acid in the atmosphere, the speedily-developed green seed-lobes of the Mustard-and-cress are separated as far asunder as the children of wealthy people sent to Eton and Cambridge are from the city arabs who sell fusees in the streets! Still, one cannot but admire the marvellous power of adaptation in these seedlingplants, unpossessed of much food-store, which enables them in lieu of it at once to gain an honest living in another way. To the young plant it comes to the same thing eventually—whether its seed-lobes contain a legacy of nutritious material, or are endowed with speedy and active vegetative energy instead.

There is hardly a single department of the life of most kinds of plants where we do not find the laws of political and social economy in operation, and that to a degree which surprises the student of this science, from the human point of view, and furnishes him with many an apt illustration in the prosecution of his researches.

I have already referred to leaf-buds, and the manner they are protected from frost by those out

side and modified leaves called scales or bracts.

The story of the formation of leaf-buds is not without a moral. People uneducated in botany imagine they are all formed in the spring of the year, but the real

FIG. 70. Gooseberry leaves gradually passing into scales.

The

fact is, that before last summer's leaves had fallen their successors had been already appointed. former had not only laboured during the summer to separate the carbon from the oxygen of the carbonic acid gas they had inhaled, they had not only enabled the shrub or tree to add to the store of its woody bulk, but they had further developed the materials out of which their leaf-successors should be fashioned. Leaf-buds are everywhere stores of accumulated or saved up materials, out of which future leaves will be formed. It is always the future rather than the present which is thus kept in view. Some plants, so to speak, bank underground. All they have saved is stored up, not in the form of leaf-buds grouped on the wintry branches, but as underground buds, such as the tubers of the Potato, etc., Artichokes,

Earth-nuts, granules of Saxifrages, Pilewort, etc. These parts of plants are not all roots, as people imagine, but frequently true buds; so that we have underground as well as aboveground buds. From these subterranean parts new plants will arise, as every man knows who has planted potatoes. He is aware that one large potato may be cut up into a number of small pieces, and that each piece will develop, if placed in proper soil, into a new Potatoplant, provided he does not damage the "eyes" in cutting up. These "eyes These "eyes" are in reality the parts where growth takes place, the rest of the potato being simply so much starch-food, on which the young plant feeds, as certainly as an infant does on its mother's breast, until it gets strong enough to absorb its own nutriment from the soil. Singularly enough, the most beautiful plants in the world resort to this method of underground storage of foodmaterial, all intended either for another season or for another individual. In the "bulbs" of the Hyacinth, Lily, Daffodil, Snowdrop, Tulip, etc., and those of the various Orchids, we have a store of starch, laid by for next year, saved out of last summer's vegetable earnings.

Get the bulb of a Dutch Hyacinth, sold by florists, and place it in the top of one of the coloured glasses made on purpose to receive it, first filling the glass with rain-water, so that the base kept moistened.

of the bulb is

Let the plant be placed in the