PLANTS AND ANIMALS IN WINTER. 497 



unlock tlie castle of the ice king. Then the spirit of growth 

 within each spore begins to assert itself once more, and, burst- 

 ing the walls, the contents soon produce the parent or summer 

 form of the plant with which we are most familiar. Thus the 

 spores which next season will produce the grape mildew and the 

 red rust of wheat are now in existence, the former within the 

 substance of the fallen grape leaf, the latter within the stubble 

 or about the roots of last season's wheat plants. 



If the grape leaves should be carefully gathered and burned, 

 and the stubble destroyed in like manner, not only would the 

 next season's crop of these two parasitic plant pests be wonder- 

 fully lessened, but many injurious insects would at the same 

 time be destroyed. 



Higher in the scale of plant life we find the flowering an- 

 nuals bending all their energies during the summer to produce 

 that peculiar form, the " seed," which is only a little plant boxed 

 up to successfully withstand the rigors of winter. The great 

 sunflower, that grows into a giant in a single season and defies 

 the summer sun and storm, falls an easy victim to the frosts of 

 autumn. It, however, prepares the way for many successors in 

 the ripened seeds, each one of which, under favorable conditions, 

 will germinate, grow, reproduce its kind, and thus complete 

 another cycle in the realm of vegetable life. The prospective 

 life and activity of a whole field of next summer's waving corn 

 may be considered as stored up in a few pecks of comparatively 

 lifeless seed corn safely housed in the granary. Within its two 

 protective coats and surrounded by a large store of food, in the 

 form of seed leaf or nucleus, to be used when growth begins 

 again, each little plantlet lives and survives the coldest blasts of 

 King Boreas and his cohorts. 



Note, too, the buds and underground stems which will furnish 

 the beginning of next season's growth of our biennial and peren- 

 nial plants. See how they are protected by heavy overcoats in 

 the form of bud scales. Oftentimes, too, as in the hickory and 

 " balm of Gilead " trees, these scales have a coat of resin or gum 

 on the outside to render them waterproof; and some, as those 

 of the pawpaw, are even fur-lined, or rather fur-covered, with a 

 coating of soft black hairs. Were these protective scales not 

 present, the tender shoots within them, which will furnish the 

 nucleus of next season's foliage, would be seared and withered 

 by the first frost as quickly as though touched with a red- 

 hot iron. 



The above are some of the many ways in which our plants, 



in the course of ages and many changes of environment, have 



solved the problem of surviving the cold of winter. Moreover, 



they always prepare for this cold in time, the resting spores and 

 VOL. L. 37 



