Development of the Vegetation of New York State 27 
produces upon the ground which it invades lies in the sort 
of structure which the plant, especially the cormophytic 
plant erects — the machinery it sets up as one may say — to 
earry on its life activities, particularly of nutrition and 
erowth. It will be recalled that with the green plant, nutri- 
tion is not a question of finding and consuming highly organ- 
ized products such as carbohydrates and proteins, but liter- 
ally of assembling the raw materials from soil and atmos- 
phere and, out of these, of manufacturing organic food. 
Your student of the high school will demonstrate to you that 
the first visible product of this manufacture is starch. There 
is a certain aptness therefore in saying that a green plant 
“sets up its machinery.” This is the more emphasized when 
you reflect that this ‘“‘ machinery” must include means of 
absorbing energy from the sun — hence, the expanse of fol- 
lage exposing the green pigment chlorophyll.t We have then 
in our ideal green plant—-a great tree for example —a 
columnar structure of great strength and permanence, dis- 
playing through a system of branching its maximum expanse 
of foliage. This column rests upon the earth and is anchored 
in it by members massive in proportion to the stress exerted 
on the crown. These great anchorage and buttressing roots 
affect soil conditions by penetrating and loosening up the 
soil and by building up the soil level — notably in wet soils. 
(Fig. 15 shows a great pine tree which has built up, or 
about which has accumulated a body of soil and duff some 
four feet above the general swamp ground level. This 
‘“humpy ” appearance of newly cleared swamp or wet lands 
is a familiar phenomenon in New York State.) 
The capacity of chlorophyll bearing plants to transform 
into organic compounds certain raw materials of earth and 
atmosphere, means that the plant organism can invade a ter- 
1 The reader who desires to gain a more intimate knowledge of the 
role played by the green pigment of plants — chlorophyll — in the food 
manufacturing work of leaves will find an excellent account of this 
important subject in Ganone’s book The Living Plant, (New York, 
Henry Holt & Company, 1913) chapter II, on the prevalence of green 
color in plants and why it exists, or chlorophyll and photosynthesis. 
