58 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 



carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulphur. 

 Sometimes it is almost watery, sometimes half- 

 horny, but as a rule it is waxy or soft in texture. 

 It is very plastic. Its peculiar characteristic is 

 that it is restlessly alive, so to speak; seen under 

 a microscope, it moves about uneasily, with a 

 strange streaming motion, as if in search of some- 

 thing it wanted. It is, in point of fact, the build- 

 ing-material of life; and out of it the living parts 

 of every creature that lives, whether animal or 

 vegetable, are framed and compounded. 



But it is plants alone that know how to make 

 protoplasm, or other organic matter, direct from 

 the dead material around them. Animals can only 

 take living matter ready-made from plants, and 

 burn it up again by reunion with oxygen in their 

 own bodies. The plant manufactures it. The ani- 

 mal destroys it. Chlorophyll bodies or the active 

 green-stuff of leaves is a special modification or va- 

 riety of protoplasm ; and chlorophyll alone pos- 

 sesses the power to manufacture new energy- 

 yielding and living material, under the influence of 

 sunlight, from the dead and inert bodies around it. 

 The materials which it thus produces are after- 

 wards worked up by the plant, together with the ni- 

 trogen, sulphur, and phosphorus supplied by the 

 roots, into fresh starch and fresh protoplasm, con- 

 taining fresh chlorophyll. These the animal may 

 afterwards eat in the form of leaves, seeds, or fruits. 



The tiniest primitive one-celled plant contains 

 protoplasm and chlorophyll (though a few degen- 

 erate plants, like fungi, have none of the living 

 green-stuff, and can make no new living material 

 for themselves, but depend, like animals, upon the 

 industry of others). Every living cell of every 

 plant contains protoplasm; a cell without any is 



