lS2 



SAGACITY AND MORALITY OF PLANTS. 



side and modified leaves called scales or bracts. The 

 story of the formation of leaf-buds is not without a 

 moral. People uneducated in botany imagine they 

 are all formed in the spring of the year, but the real 



Fig. 70. — Gooseberry leaves gradually passing into scales. 



fact is, that before last summer's leaves had fallen 

 their successors had been already appointed. The 

 former had not only laboured during the summer to 

 separate the carbon from the oxygen of the car- 

 bonic acid gas they had inhaled, they had not only 

 enabled the shrub or tree to add to the store of its 

 woody bulk, but they had further developed the 

 materials out of which their leaf-successors should be 

 fashioned. Leaf-buds are everywhere stores of ac- 

 cumulated or saved up materials, out of which future 

 leaves will be formed. It is always the future rather 

 than the present which is thus kept in view. Some 

 plants, so to speak, bank underground. All they 

 have saved is stored up, not in the form of leaf-buds 

 grouped on the wintry branches, but as underground 

 buds, such as the tubers of the Potato, etc.. Artichokes, 



