CHAPTER IV 



THE KINDS OF WORK THAT ARE DONE BY PLANTS, AND 

 THE SOURCE OF THEIR POWER TO DO IT 



Respiration 



HEN first I had written this chapter, and made it the 

 best that I could, it assumed that the fact of plant 

 work was already well-known to the reader. A later 

 experience, however, made me see very clearly that 

 most people do not know that plants work at all. Accordingly 

 I shall make it my first endeavor to show beyond question that 

 plants do work; then we can pass with better understanding to 

 the study of the very remarkable source from which they derive 

 their power to do it. 



The principal reason why the majority of people do not as- 

 sociate with plants the idea of work is found in the slowness of 

 most plant actions. Our conception of work is almost entirely 

 subjective, and because plants are placid of mien, and do not hurry 

 and fret and strain, we think they are doing no work. When the 

 Master said of the Lilies, that they toil not neither do they spin, 

 his words expressed the popular fancy but not the physical fact. 

 Work is none the less real because it is slow, and the matter of 

 slowness is entirely relative and subjective. Even the very swift- 

 est actions performed by any of us must seem slowness person- 

 ified to the lightning, or to a dynamite charge which can finish 

 its work before you can think, or to the forces of collision which 

 reduce a railway train to a heap of tangled scraps within the 

 space of an instant. Probably the lightning, the dynamite, or 

 the collision forces, if interviewed on the subject, would say that 



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