58 COLI^ CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



history of life ; indeed, the more one looks at the ap- 

 parently spontaneous and voluntary movements of this 

 formless primary protoplasm, the more exactly do all its 

 properties, even in a plant, seem to resemble those of 

 conscious and intelligent beings. It is not merely that 

 protoplasm feels its way and moves responsively to 

 changes around it, but it also acts with every appearance 

 of deliberate volition. All winter long these living prin- 

 ciples of the dead leaves remain stored up within the 

 trunk or branches ; and now, when the sun returns to us 

 again, they are pushed up anew into the bursting buds, 

 and go to form the young leaves of the new year. The 

 vital protoplasm divides itself once more into cell after 

 cell in the fresh foliage ; each little globule surrounds 

 itself with a solid wall secreted from its own substance 

 and the whole mass burgeons forth apace into a new set 

 of leaves. 



Thus in one sense we might almost say that this year's 

 leaves are last year's over again. "Whatever was really 

 vital in them remains ; what was cast away was but the 

 bare shell that surrounded the true living material. 

 Trees, in fact, are plant communities which have learned 

 thus to keep up a common life apart from the life of the 

 separate individuals which make them up. Their stems 

 differ from the stems of herbs only in the thickness of 

 their cell-walls and the absence of living matter in the 

 woody tissues. Accordingly, trees appear in the most 

 widely different families of plants ; and sometimes they 

 are closely related to very small and weedy types, as 

 among the roses, which vary in stature from little creep- 

 ing herbs like the wild strawberry to tall trunks like the 

 pear-tree. Wide as the difference seems to us, it is but 

 a slight one in reality : a tree is only an herb which has 

 prospered best by growing stiff and perennial, and so 



