PLANTS AND ANIMALS IN WINTER 315 



the summer sun and storm, falls an easy victim to the 

 frosts of autumn. It, however, prepares the way for 

 many successors in the ripened seeds, each one of 

 which, under favorable conditions, will germinate, 

 grow, reproduce its kind, and thus complete another 

 cycle in the realm of vegetable life. The prospective 

 life and activity of a whole field of next summer's 

 waving corn may be considered as stored up in a few 

 pecks of comparatively lifeless seed corn safely housed 

 in the granary. Within its two protecting coats and 

 surrounded by a large store of food, in the form of 

 seed leaf or nucleus, to be used when growth begins 

 again, each little plantlet lives and survives the cold- 

 est blasts of King Boreas and his cohorts. 



Note, too, the buds and under-ground stems which 

 will furnish the beginning of next season's growth of 

 our biennial and perennial plants. See how they are 

 protected by heavy overcoats in the 

 Winter form of bud scales. Oftentimes, too, as 

 in the hickory and "balm of Gilead" 

 trees, these scales have a coat of resin or gum on the 

 outside to render them waterproof; and some, as those 

 of the papaw, are even fur-lined, or rather fur-cov- 

 ered, with a coating of soft black hairs. Were these 

 protective scales not present, the tender shoots within 

 them, which will furnish the nucleus for next season's 

 foliage, would be seared and withered by the first frost 

 as quickly as though touched with a red-hot iron. 



The above are some of the many ways in which our 

 plants, in the course of ages and many changes of 

 environment, have solved the problem of surviving 

 the cold of winter. Moreover, they always prepare 



