PLANT 



PLANT 



food. The grazing animals and those that 

 live upon roots, leaves or any other parts of 

 plants are immediately dependent, but even 

 the flesh-eating animals owe their life to plains, 

 for it is on plants that thrir prey is f. <!. 



And man no less, in one or the other of these 

 fashions, derives all his food from plants, and 

 this fact demonstrates that farmers and gar- 

 deners are really the most important members 

 of human society. A thoughtful glance at 

 wha* 1 at dinner will show this in in- 



-?ing fashion. Perhaps there is a vegetable 

 soup. It contains carrots a root; tomatoes 

 a fruit; onions a stem; parsley a leaf growth; 

 and rice the seeds of a grass. The bread, too, 

 is made from seeds; the dressing for the salad 

 :" olive oil and a vinegar which may be 

 traced back to the juicy apple; the sugar, 

 the flavoring in the pudding, and even the 

 after-dinner mints, are direct plant products, 

 while the steak could never have been pro- 

 duced had there not been a good growth of 

 grass on which beef cattle could feed. Of all 

 that is on the table salt alone is not, in one 

 way or another, due to plants. 



After dinner the crackling fire in the grate 

 is either of logs straight from the forest or 

 of coal which is the product of long-ago forests ; 

 and the paper on which the pleasing book is 

 printed is no less traceable to plants than is 

 the fragrant cigar. Further tracing of the uses 

 of plants is unnecessary here the reader will 

 find pleasure in examining the common things 

 about him and determining for himself just 

 how many of them at one time grew in field 

 or forest. 



Evolution of Plants. Scientists no longer be- 

 lieve that every variety of plant was brought 

 into the world separate and distinct from every 

 other variety; to plants as well as to animals 

 they apply the doctrine of evolution (which see). 

 That is, they believe that all plant forms, how- 

 ever complex, have developed through un- 

 numbered ages from the simplest one-cell forms. 

 First to emerge from the single-cell life, they 

 believe, were the algae, and from them the 

 liverworts developed and the fungi degenerated. 

 Out of the liverworts arose the mosses, from 

 them the ferns, and from the ferns, finally, the 

 flowering, or seed, plants. Incredibly slow was 

 the process, and by no means all of its steps 

 have been traced, but enough has been learned 

 from fossil and intermediate forms to convince 

 most students and to silence the chorus of 

 denial which arose when the great Charles 

 Darwin first announced his theory of evolution. 



The process of growth and change still goes 

 on, though too slowly to be visible, and man 

 with all his study and with all his plant 

 breeding has not been able to assist in it ma- 

 terially. He has made fruits, {lowers and seeds 

 larger; he has taken the seed from the orange, 

 the thorn from the cactus, but he has not been 

 able to develop a single new plant organ. No 

 plant produces seed through the agency of 

 man which did not do so before he experi- 

 mented with it. The earliest-known wild rice 

 had tiny, unpalatable seeds, while the rice of 

 to-day lias a vastly enlarged and improved seed 

 which furnishes food to millions of people ; but 

 the little first seed was just as capable of pro- 

 ducing new plants as is the developed seed, 

 and that is the main function of a plant to 

 reproduce itself. 



Plant Parts. Not all plants have "evolved" 

 far; that is, not all of them haVe special 

 organs for accomplishing their purposes. In 

 some all the life processes are carried on in 

 a single cell. But the best-known plants have 

 those highly developed organs, roots, stem, 

 leaves, flowers and fruits, in which are the 

 seed. The roots hold the plant in place and 

 absorb from the soil water and food; the stem 

 supports the leaves and blossoms and carries 

 the sap from the roots to the upper. parts of 

 the plant; the leaves absorb carbon dioxide, 

 give off oxygen and in some way not yet clear 

 change the raw food materials into such form 

 that they are of use to the plant; the flower 

 produces the seed and the fruit, the chief pur- 

 pose of which is to contain the seeds. A.MC c. 



Related Subjects. The following list does not 

 contain all the plants which are treated in these 

 volumes, for many of them are classified under 

 the topics here indicated. The article BOTANY, 

 also, which should be read in this connection, in- 

 cludes a list of more general topics which bear a 

 close relation to plant study in some of its very 

 numerous phases. 



Carnivorous Plants 



(with list) 

 Flowers (with list) 

 Fruit (with list) 

 Grains 

 Grasses (with list) 



Ivy 



Lysimachia 

 Smilax 



Medicine and Drugs 



(with list) 

 Nut (with list ) 

 Tree (with list) 

 Vegetables (with list) 



CREEPERS 



Virginia Creeper 

 Wandering Jew 



Aloe 

 Cactus 



Century Plant 

 Mesquite 



DESERT PLANTS 



Prickly Pear 



Sagebrush 



Yucca 



