EELINOIS NATURAL HISTORY SURVEY MANUAL 1 
MARCH 1936 
Wild Flowers 
WHERE THEY GROW AND HOW THEY ARE FORMED 
~ 
Ye field flowers! the gardens eclipse you ’t is true: 
Yet wildlings of nature, I dote upon you, 
For ye waft me to summers of old 
When the earth teemed around me with fairy delight, 
And when daisies and buttercups gladdened my sight, 
Like treasures of silver and gold. 
Field Flowers—Tuomas CAMPBELL 
HY is the dominant color of vegetation green? It is be- 
cause most plants contain millions of tiny round or oval 
bodies which are filled with a substance that happens to be 
green. Because it is green this substance is called chlorophyll, 
meaning leaf green. 
Chlorophyll is one of the most important things on earth 
because it enables the plants that have it to manufacture food 
from carbon dioxide and water. Either we eat the plants or 
animals do; in the first case chlorophyll is of direct importance 
in human food and in the second it is indirectly concerned, for 
people may eat the meat of such grazing animals as cattle and 
sheep. Or, chlorophyll may be important in the lives of things 
man uses, such as the wood of trees for houses and furniture, 
herbs for medicines, and numberless extracts in the chemistry 
of certain industries. 
Importance of flowers.—Like other living things, plants 
grow old and die. Therefore, they must reproduce that there 
may be a constant supply of plants year after year. Flowers 
are the structures primarily concerned with reproduction; to 
understand this relationship is to know the flowers’ true im- 
portance. Secondly, flowers are beautiful in combinations of 
colors, shapes, sizes and numbers of parts that are truly astonish- 
ing and worthy a lifetime of study. 
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