THE EOMANCE OF 

 PLANT LIFE 



CHAPTER I 



THE ACTIVITY OF VEGETABLES 



Plants which move — Sensitive Plant — A tourist from Neptune — The 

 World's and the British harvest — Working of green leaves— Power of 

 sunshine — Work done by an acre of plants — Coltsfoot, dandehon, 

 pansies, in sunshine and in cold — Woodsorrel and crocus — Foxglove 

 — Leaves and light — Adventures of a carbon atom — The sap — 

 Cabbages and oaks requiring water — Traveller's tree — The water in 

 trees— An oasis in Greece — The associate hfe of its trees and flowers. 



WHEN we remember either the general appearance 

 or the way in which a cabbage or a turnip appears 

 to exist, it does not seem possible to call them 

 active. It is difficult to imagine anything less lively than 

 an ordinary vegetable. They seem to us the very model of 

 dullness, stupidity, and slowness; they cannot move even 

 from one field to the next ; they are " fast rooted in the 

 soil"; "they languidly adjust their vapid vegetable loves" 

 like Tennyson's Oak. 



In fact one usually speaks of vegetating when anybody is 

 living a particularly dull, unexciting kind of life in one 

 particular place. 



And it even seems as if the books, which are supposed to 



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