10 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 



from them the carbon which is the principal food 

 and raw material of plant life. Plants also drink, 

 but, unlike ourselves, they have quite different 

 mouths to eat with and to drink with. They take 

 in their more solid constituent, carbon, with their 

 leaves from the air ; but they take in their liquid 

 constituent, water, with their roots and rootlets 

 from the soil beneath them. " More solid," I say, 

 because the greater part of the wood and harder 

 tissues of plants is made up of carbon, in com- 

 bination with other less important materials; 

 though, when the plants eat this carbon, it is not 

 in the solid form, but in the shape of a gas, car- 

 bonic acid, as I shall more fully explain when 

 we come to consider this subject in detail. For 

 the present, it will be enough to remember that 

 Plants are living things, which eat and drink exactly 

 as we ourselves do. 



Plants also marry and rear families. They 

 have two distinct sexes, male and female some- 

 times separated on different plants, but more 

 often united on the same stem, or even combined 

 in the same flower. For flowers are the reproduc- 

 tive parts of plants; they are there for the pur- 

 pose of producing the seeds, from which new 

 plants spring, and by means of which each kind 

 is perpetuated. The male portions of plants of 

 the higher types are known as stamens; they shed 

 a yellow powder which we call pollen, and this 

 powder has a fertilising influence on the young 

 seeds or mules. The female portion of plants of 

 the higher types is known as the pistil; it con- 

 tains tiny undeveloped knobs or ovules, which 

 can only swell out and grow into fruitful seeds 

 provided they have been fertilised by pollen from 

 the stamens of their own or some other flower. 



