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CHAPTER IV. 



OF THE LEAVES. 



Leaves are at once organs of respiration, digestion, and 

 nutrition. They elaborate the crude sap impelled into them 

 from the stem, parting with its water, adding to it carbon, 

 and exposing the whole to the action of air ; and while they 

 supply the necessary food to the young fibres that pass down- 

 wards from them and from the buds, in the form of alburnum 

 and liber, they also furnish nutriment to all the parts imme- 

 diately above and beneath them. There are many experiments 

 to show that such is the purpose of the leaves. If a number 

 of rings of bark are separated by species without bark, those 

 which have leaves upon them will live much longer than those 

 which are destitute of leaves. If leaves are stripped from a 

 plant before the fruit has commenced ripening, the fruit will 

 fall off and not ripen. If a branch is deprived of leaves for a 

 whole summer, it will either die or not increase in size per- 

 ceptibly. The presence of cotyledons, or seminal leaves, at a 

 time when no other leaves have been formed for nourishino- 

 the young plant, is considered a further proof of the nutritive 

 purposes of leaves : if the cotyledons are cut ofF, the seed will 

 either not vegetate at all, or slowly and with great difficulty ; 

 and if they are injured by old age, or any other circumstance, 

 they produce a languor of habit which only ceases with the 

 life of the plant, if it be an annual. This is the reason why 

 gardeners prefer old melon and cucumber seeds to new ones : 

 in the former the nutritive power of the seed-leaves is im- 

 paired, the young plant grows slowly, a languid circulation is 

 induced from the begiiniing ; by wliich excessive luxuriance 

 is checked, and fruit formed rather than leaves or branches- 



Notliing can be more admirable than the adaptation of leaves 

 to such purposes as those just mentioned. It has been already 



