PROCEEDINGS OF THE ANNUAL MEETING. 139 



I have my students in botany make experiments. One student cuts off 

 the top of 8L radish, weighing while fresh the top and the root separately; 

 then both are dried in a hot oven, to learn that about ninety per cent, of 

 the tops and ninety-five per cent, of the roots have evaporated. The stu- 

 dent who experiments with grass finds usually that seventy-five to eighty 

 per cent, evaporates on drying. Dried seeds contain fourteen to fifteen 

 per cent, of water. 



Protococcus is a minute, one-celled, green plant floating in water or 

 found in wet places. This tiny plant has no roots, no leaves, no stem, no 

 flowers, and yet reproduces its kind by cell-division. It absorbs, assimi- 

 lates, grows, and multiplies, performing a great variety of work with a 

 very simple apparatus. In a higher plant the work is divided, more like 

 that in a large factory where each person has a certain part of the labor to 

 perform. 



MEANS OF DEFENSE OF PLANTS. 



Plants are protected from animals in a great variety of ways: by offen- 

 sive odor, by poison, by disagreeable taste, by prickles, stings, and thorns, 

 by offensive hairs. Milky juice keeps insect borers from laying eggs in 

 the stem, and ants from climbing to the flowers where they would eat the 

 sweet nectar without paying for it by fertilizing each flower, as would be 

 done by many insects which approach the flowers on the wing. 



If good, old Doctor Watts were yet alive and able to write verses, and 

 should become a botanist of the modern style, he would no doubt revise 

 some of his work, a portion of which would read in this way: 



" How doth the little busy bee 

 improve each shining hour, 

 By carrying pollen day by day 

 To fertilizer each flower." 



This view is much less selfish than the original version, so far as the 

 bee is concerned. 



Three fourths of our commercial products are of plant origin, and fur- 

 nish the bulk of our food and clothing and materials for buildings, and 

 with these the botanist has to deal. To help in the economic portion of 

 this work, we have agricultural colleges, experiment stations, botanic gar- 

 dens, explorations by botanists, agricultural and horticultural conventions 

 and societies, numerous publications by the press, and museums and great 

 expositions. 



PLANT FOOD, THE SUPPLY AND DEMAND. 



This was the title of the subjoined paper, by Prof. L. E. Taft of the 

 Agricultural college: 



We are all aware that growth can not be secured in an animal unless a 

 proper supply of proper food is furnished. For a long time it was not 

 known that plants also must be fed, but chemists by analyzing them have 

 learned the elements and the proportion of each that enter into them. 



We have been able then to go to work from the other side, and by sup- 



