THE GREEN LEAF. 57 



are intimately bound up with those of all the others, on 

 whom he depends variously , for food and clothing ; 

 whereas the polype is like a mere hunting savage, self- 

 supporting and comparatively isolated, though forming 

 part of a rudely aggregated whole. And just as one 

 individual in the community may die without endanger- 

 ing the existence of the community in its corporate 

 capacity, so the separate leaves may fall away and die 

 without endangering or lessening the life of a tree on 

 which they grew. In this way they differ materially 

 from the organs of a single organism, no one of which 

 can be cut away without seriously damaging the entire 

 body of which it is a portion. 



Metaphysical as this conception sounds at first hearing, 

 it would still be hard to realize in any other fashion the 

 actual life of trees. The green leaves which they are 

 now putting forth so abundantly are each new members 

 of the foliar commonwealth. They spring from buds, 

 prepared for the purpose before last winter set in ; and 

 they are nurtured by the material drawn from the dead 

 leaves of last year's crop ; for that is how the corporate 

 existence is kept up from season to season. What fell 

 last autumn was not the living part of the leaves ; it was 

 merely the dead skeleton of the foliage the mass of 

 empty cells and stringy fibre, from which all truly vital 

 matter had been carefully withdrawn. The active pro- 

 toplasm and green chlorophyl from each cell of the leaf 

 moved slowly out with strange groping serpentine 

 motions, like little shapeless jelly-bag animals, at the 

 first approach of autumn frosts, and stored themselves 

 up securely in the permanent tissues of the stem till the 

 present time. How they have acquired the cunning to 

 do so, under the influence of natural selection, is one of 

 the greatest problems yet remaining unsolved in all the 



