120 GARDENING WITH BRAINS ^ 



If you don't know, and want to see it demon- 

 strated graphically and geographically, spend a 

 summer, as we did twice, at the hotel on top of 

 Roan Mountain, in North Carolina. The land- 

 lord will show you, any day, in which county or 

 township of which of the five states in sight the 

 particular shower you see is going on. 



One day (in Maine) there were showers all 

 around us, on the mountains and in the valleys, 

 but our garden got about seventeen drops. 

 Next morning, nevertheless, the potato plants 

 had little rings of moisture around their stems. 

 The bright little things have learned how to 

 circumvent drought by gathering the dew and 

 growing a special set of rootlets near the sur- 

 face to profit by it, if only for a few hours daily. 

 Corn utilizes the dew the same way; so does 

 lettuce; while the conical shape of the romaine 

 plants seems to have been evolved especially 

 for dew-catching purposes ; it helps them flourish 

 in midsummer. 



I remember reading, some years ago, about an 

 attempt made in some arid region to collect the 

 dew by means of huge conical metal sheets. 

 There are lots of things plants can teach us. 



THE MOST MARVELOUS THING IN THE WORLD 



Darwin called the tiny brain of the ant the 

 most marvelous thing in the world, but Mark 

 Twain showed by his amusing experiment in the 

 Black Forest how grotesquely limited is the 



