26 PROSERPINA. 



plant can get both water and ammonia from the atmosphere ; 

 and, I believe, for the most part does so ; though, when it 

 cannot get water*from the air, it will gladly drink by its roots. 

 But the things it cannot receive from the air at all are certain 

 earthy salts, essential to it (as iron is essential in our own 

 blood), and of which when it has quite exhausted the earth, no 

 more such plants can grow in that ground. On this subject 

 you will find enough in any modern treatise on agriculture ; 

 all that I want you to note here is that this feeding function of 

 the root is of a very delicate and discriminating kind, needing 

 much searching and mining among the dust, to find what it 

 wants. If it only wanted water, it could get most of that by 

 spreading in mere soft senseless limbs, like sponge, as far, 

 and as far down, as it could but to get the salt out of the 

 earth it has to sift all the earth, and taste and touch every 

 grain of it that it can, with fine fibres. And therefore a root 

 is not at all a merely passive sponge or absorbing thing, but 

 an infinitely subtle tongue, or tasting and eating thing. That 

 is why it is always so fibrous and divided and entangled in 

 the clinging earth. 



9. "Always fibrous and divided"? But many roots are 

 quite hard and solid ! 



No ; the active part of the root is always, I believe, a fibre. 

 But there is often a provident and passive part a savings 

 bank of root in which nourishment is laid up for the plant, 

 and which, though it may be underground, is no more to be 

 considered its real root than the kernel of a seed is. When 

 you sow a pea, if you take it up in a day or two, you will find 

 the fibre below, which is root ; the shoot above, which is plant : 

 and the pea as a now partly exhausted storehouse, looking very 

 woful, and like the granaries of Paris after the fire. So the 

 round solid root of a cyclamen, or the conical one which you 

 know so well as a carrot, are not properly roots, but perma- 

 nent storehouses, only the fibres that grow from them are roots. 

 Then there are other apparent roots which are not even store- 

 houses, but refuges ; houses where the little plant lives in its 

 infancy, through winter and rough weather. So that it will 

 be best for you at once to limit your idea of a root to this, 



