64 THE NATURE-STUDY OF PLANTS 
birds, four-footed and other animals, as well as human 
beings. 
One sometimes hears people talk about the wasteful 
ways of Dame Nature. Personally, I think that that 
is a very mistaken view; but the question is largely 
one of those interesting side issues which my readers 
must follow up for themselves in their own way as 
opportunity offers. I want them, however, to be not 
only enthusiastic but also reverent students of Nature. 
We have been taught in our youth, and as life pro- 
gresses Our own experience confirms the wisdom of, 
the four words, ‘‘ Waste not, want not,’’ and Nature 
does not set the bad example of reckless prodigality. 
In pollination thousands of grainssare produced for 
every one that fertilizes a seedlet, but the remainder 
are not wasted, since they pay, so to speak, the 
working expenses of the pollination mechanism. The 
seeds which fail to develop into plants are not wasted 
either, for if, instead of feeding the hungry, they perish 
and die, even so, like the pollen grains that fall to 
earth and rot, they return to the soil and the atmo- 
sphere those elements of which they are composed and 
which are thus put at the disposal of other organisms. 
Change and decay are always in process, but nothing 
in the world can ever be destroyed in the sense of 
being annihilated or utterly useless for evermore. 
Decay and putrescence, especially of animal matter, are 
indeed unattractive to us, but we should realize that, 
like respiration, they» help to keep the atmosphere 
supplied with carbon dioxide which is so indispensable 
for plant nutrition. Every organism that breathes 
exhales this gas and so helps to replenish the supply, 
and the animal world effects a further reduction of its 
debt to the vegetable by the decay of the dead body, 
