Masterpieces of Science 



Often one finds a plant hardly a foot high with 

 roots extending eight feet from its stem. 



And beyond the beaches where the beach peas 

 dig so diligently are the seaweeds — with a talent 

 for picking and choosing all their own. Dr. 

 Julius Sachs, a leading German botanist, believes 

 that the parts of plants owe their form, as crys- 

 tals do, to their peculiarities of substance; that 

 just as salt crystallizes in one shape and sugar 

 in another, so a seaweed or a tulip is moulded by 

 the character of its juices. Something certainly 

 of the crystal's faculty for picking out particles 

 akin to itself, and building with them, is shown 

 by the kelp which attracts from the ocean both 

 iodine and bromine — often dissolved though they 

 are in a million times their bulk of sea water. 

 This trait of choosing this or that dish from the 

 feast afforded by sea or soil or air is not peculiar 

 to the seaweeds; every plant displays it. Beech 

 trees love to grow on limestone and thus declare 

 to the explorer the limestone ridge he seeks. In 

 the Horn silver mine, of Utah, the zinc mingled 

 with the silver ore is betrayed by the abundance 

 of the zinc violet, a delicate and beautiful cousin 

 of the pansy. In Germany this little flower is 

 admittedly a signal of zinc in the earth, and zinc 

 is found in its juices. The late Mr. William 

 Dorn, of South Carolina, had faith in a bush, of 

 unrecorded name, as betokening gold-bearing 

 veins beneath it. That his faith was not without 

 foundation is proved by the large fortune he won 

 as a gold miner in the Blue Ridge country — his 

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