A GLIMPSE OF THE LIFE OF CHLOROPHYLLOUS PLANTS. 85 
The spectacle afforded by the wonderful energies prisoned 
within the compass of a microscopic hair of a plant which 
we commonly regard as a merely passive organism, is not 
easily forgotten by one who has watched the display 
continued hour after hour without pause or sign of weaken- 
ing The possible complexity of many other organic forms 
dawns upon one; and the comparison of such a protoplasm 
to a body with internal circulation which has been put 
forward by an eminent physiologist loses much of its 
startling character. Currents similar to those of the hairs 
of the nettle have been observed in a great multitude of 
very different plants, and weighty authorities have suggested 
that they possibly occur in more or less perfection in all 
young vegetable cells. If such be the case, the wonderful 
noon-day silence of a tropical forest is after all only due 
to the dulness of our hearing, and could our ears catch the 
murmur of these tiny maelstroms as they whirl in the 
innumerable myriads of living cells which constitute each 
tree, we should be stunned as with the roar of a great 
city.” 
In this exceedingly beautiful and happy description, there 
is reference to a limpid liquid protoplasm in the common 
nettle, and, by inference, in all living plants. Whence this 
liquid? We know that unless the roots of a plant are 
supplied with water the plant droops, and if water is with- 
held for a prolonged period, it ultimately dies. At first 
sight we would reasonably conclude that the whole of that 
portion of a plant in the ground absorbs the necessary 
water; this, however, is not the case, as it is only in the 
very earliest stage of the root proper that it absorbs water. 
It is through microscopic hairs which rapidly grow on the 
root and its branches that a plant obtains water, with its 
accompanying salts and nitrogen. Roots are provided with 
a cap, the outer cells of which perish early, but during 
their life they protect the apix of the root in the soil 
