THE STEM 39 



plates of cells running through the wood and inner bark in the 

 direction from the centre of the tree to the outside and acting 

 as a system of storehouses and passages for food supplies. 

 Beside the medullary rays there are many cells, distributed 

 especially in the inner bark and outer wood, that receive and 

 store up reserve materials. 



Invisible porters, as has been stated, must be in attendance, 

 for, as the supplies advance, a constant distribution goes on. 

 In the warehouses on the route stores of reserve food are laid 

 up for the use of the tree from the train wagons as they pass by 

 on the downward route and stop at each station. The sugars, 

 and also some proteins, soak through the walls of the leaf-cells 

 into the downward track, the bast, and travel on through the 

 protoplasm of what are called the sieve-tubes ; from these they 

 soak again through cell- walls into the ultimate storehouse, 

 but the sugars are not deposited as such, being changed to 

 starch. And on the upward route the pumping installations, 

 elsewhere referred to at greater length, are of extraordinary 

 power, and can lift supplies of water containing salts in 

 solution to comparatively greater heights than the machine- 

 pumps constructed by human engineers would be able to 

 accomplish. 



The well-known author and man of science, the late Grant 

 Allen, compared such a tree to a hive of bees an intelligent 

 community working in co-operation and engaged in the most 

 diverse labours for the common good. He showed how the 

 individual members of the hive the workers, the drones and 

 the queen-bee all had their counterpart in the organization 

 called a tree, and that the resemblance was by no means 

 fantastic. The task of the tree, however, is much more 

 complicated and varied in its scope than that of the hive. 



Every cell is a super-man. During recent years many 

 chemical substances found in plant or animal tissues have been 

 formed synthetically by chemists by the operation of chemical 

 methods. While, however, in trees such substances are formed 

 by chemical action at ordinary temperatures, the chemist can 

 only form them, or rather something resembling them, by means 

 of high temperatures or the action of powerful reagents. There 

 are no German chemists who can compare in intellectual 

 ability with those at work in the tree-city. 



