REPORTS OF LOCAL SOCIETIES. 261 



the pine tree lifts its majestic liead to the sky, but to hold up in the pure air, 

 and ripening sunshine, its clusters of brown cones, witli their precious seeds. 

 AVheat is but a grass, whose stalks are girt with lines of delicate crystal flint, 

 that it may have strength to hold up the heavy head filled with the seed in 

 which is garnered the ripe sweetness of the whole plant's growth. The 

 bearded awns and the bristling palea are used to secure it safe lodgment in the 

 earth where it falls. Nature has planned to continue its life without the help 

 of man. If we pull a stalk up by the roots, they whither and die, the leaves 

 fade, and all the sap is concentrated about the embryo, striving even in death 

 to fulfill the one law of its existence, to which all else is made subservient 

 — the continuance of its kind. For there must be seed time and harvest until 

 the end of the world. 



Also tlie tares, and the unprofitable thistles, would seem, by the care taken 

 to continue their race, not so disparagingly estimated by their Creator. 

 That they may be useful or not to us, does not at all affect the elaborate pro- 

 vision for support and continuance which has been made for them. 



Sedges, ferns, and mosses, are apparently the most worthless of all nature's 

 children, so far as use is concerned, for scarcely a worm even will touch them, 

 yet they are among the most widely distributed of all our plants. These, with 

 gigantic rushes, are supposed to have formed the vegetation of the coal-mak- 

 ing period. To-day they cover much waste, w^ith a never-ceasing chemical 

 elaboration, needed to bring in into condition for man's use. The dry, coarse, 

 common brake, returns in its ashes so large a proportion of potash that it was 

 formerly much used by the poorer classes in Europe for washing, in the place 

 of soap. One delicate little fern I have found here, a pale velvety thing, gives, 

 when burned, one grain of pure potash. The rest is etherealized, and flies 

 away in vapor, or gas. Mosses thrive where no other plants would, and so help 

 to clotlie the earth, and furnish food for a higher order of plants. They 

 have the power of going on continuously, growing from their tops until vast 

 numbers of generations are buried beneath the green ponds of this year's 

 production. I have seen a ditch cut through a peat bog without having reached 

 the bottom of the moss. The moss had become a pale brown, but was 

 unchanged otherwise. 



Among the appare.itly insignificant plants which nature has tenderly pro- 

 vided for, is the common wild violet. A plant springs from seed, and does 

 not flower the first year, but produces enormous quantities of perfect seed from 

 subterranean pods, which bear no signs of flowers. The next spring it flowers 

 once, and bears seed from these flowers, and then takes up the subterranean 

 seed-bearing again. The capsules come up out of the ground as soon as they 

 are ready to burst, and so tlie seed is distributed as usual. It remains to be 

 seen for how many generations those flowerless seeds will go on producing 

 fertile plants. Nature has exact laws for all such cases. The marsh Penny- 

 wort, and the Fringed Polygale also produce subterranean or proliferous 

 flowers. Lilies produce axillary bulbs along the stalks, as well as bulbs, 

 every scale of which is in itself a separate root. One of the loose strips pro- 

 duces roots in the axils of its leaves, which become perfect plants as soon as 

 they fall to the ground. A sedge does the same thing. The intelligence of 

 man has taken advantage of many cases in which a plant stores up starch in 

 tubers underground, after it has borne its flowers, and ripened its seed in the 

 air. By a wise selection of the best for propagation the tendency of any plant 

 to do that may be increased enormously. If the potato were to fail us entirely, 

 there are wild plants that could soon be trained to take its place. In all these 



