THE STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION OF HIGHER PLANTS J $ 



The most painstaking study by the cleverest physicists has not revealed 

 certainly how a tree lifts its water from root to leaf. No process of capillary 

 action will account for the Hfting of a fluid through such a height.* Sir 

 Jagadis Chunder Bose, after years of careful examination, with the aid of 

 most ingenious and sensitive mechanism, has concluded that water is con- 

 ducted all the way by the action of individual cells, which pulse rhyth- 

 mically and exert energy as only living creatures could. The learned world 

 has listened to his theory respectfully. It may be correct, though the "men- 

 tal picture" which he promises is not one that I can make out. I can not even 

 tell whether the sap in his picture is moving through the interiors of cells 

 or in a passage between cells. If the picture is more lifelike than my un- 

 trained eye perceives, we shall learn once more that a tree is not a system of 

 mechanics, but an army of cooperating lives. That is to say, we have made 

 an erudite circle and have arrived at a term which means that we know- 

 nothing whatever about the lives or their cooperation. We have arrived 

 at the point where the savage starts his explanation of the spirit in a tree. 



As we stand here at the edge of this marauding cell which plunders 

 for the maintenance of a chlorophyll grain sixty-five hundred miles away 

 in a needle, we wonder whence came its piratical instincts. It is a mass 

 of inherited desires and abilities. It was born of an ancestry of cells that 

 reaches back to a time, perhaps a hundred and fifty million years ago, 

 when this genus of tree was first evolved upon the earth. They have left 

 their record in the rocks for geologists to read. 



The paleobotanist deciphers this record, and every syllable of his trans- 

 lation is scrutinized by rivals all over Christendom. The result of their 

 combined translations is a proof that this tree, Phius torreyana, was once a 

 flourishing species, spread far over the earth's surface. For some reason, 

 quite unknown to our best scholarship, the species declined in strength. 

 In area after area it dwindled, shrank, disappeared. Now the only known 

 remnants of the race are small clumps near San Diego and on Santa Rosa 

 Island, and possibly some stray individuals at a few other points. This kind 

 of tree has all but vanished. It will flicker out completely in a few cen- 

 turies, except as man fosters it. Why did it die? 



Here is a flourishing specimen, seeming to have unlimited vitality, 

 growing lustily to a great height. Its vigor seems unabated. Why does its 

 race not succeed in the competition of nature? That is one more secret of 

 our pine tree. 



• Capillarity and cohesion of water molecules is now considered a satisfactory 

 theory. — Ed. 



