20 SAGACITY AND MORALITY OF PLANTS. 



do would be to swell from the moisture it absorbed. 



The skin which covered it would then burst, the two 



seed-lobes would part 

 asunder, but they would 

 not separate, for the 

 delicate embryo has a 

 firm hold upon them. 

 "'"■-'-- ' - ■ -'---•-^l-i:^^'^^^' These two halves now 



Fig. 4. — Embryo of Bean beginning to sprout ^lQX. aS a "wCt-nurSC" 



in the Soil. 



for the embryo — it 

 draws all its nourishment from them for a time, just 

 as an infant abstracts its food from the breasts of its 

 mother. As it feeds on what the cotyledons con- 

 tain it gets stronger and increases in size. One 

 part of the embryo (the radicle) slowly, and by an 

 instinct which never fails, makes its way into the 

 soil and becomes the root. The other part (the 

 plumule) just as undeviatingly grows upwards, not 

 unfrequently carrying the cotyledons with it, until 

 they are lifted quite out of the soil where we planted 

 them. Henceforth the vegetable infant will get all 

 the nourishment it requires, and more, from the soil 

 and the atmosphere. 



Growth in plants is produced by the multiplication 

 of cells. If a man were to place a single brick in a 

 bit of freehold land, and expect it to grow into a 

 house, we should think he showed undoubted fitness 

 for a lunatic asylum. Nevertheless, the actual growth 

 of every plant is as if one brick of a house had the 



