SOME PLANT BIOGRAPHIES. 185 



other foliage overshadows them or competes in 

 their neighbourhood for carbonic acid, they grow 

 apace into a little tuft of spreading leaves, about 

 half an inch long or less, and forming in the mass 

 a rough circle. For about a week or ten days the 

 little mouths go on drinking in carbonic acid as 

 fast as they can, and manufacturing it under the 

 influence of sunlight into starches and proto- 

 plasm. At the end of that time they have col- 

 lected enough material to send up a slender blos- 

 soming stem, about an inch high or more, bearing 

 no leaves, but developing at the top a few tiny 

 flower-buds. These shortly open and display 

 their flowers, very small and inconspicuous, with 

 four wee white petals, each so deeply cleft that 

 they resemble eight to a casual observer. Inside 

 the petals are six little active stamens; and inside 

 the stamens again a two-celled ovary. The blos- 

 soms are visited and fertilised on warm March 

 mornings by small spring midges, attracted by 

 the petals. They immediately set their seeds in 

 tne flat green capsule, ripen them rapidly in the 

 eye of the sun, and shed them at once, the whole 

 life of the plant thus seldom exceeding three or 

 four weeks in a favourable season. At the same 

 time, the leaves and roots wither, as the material 

 they contained is rapidly withdrawn from them, 

 and used up in the process of maturing the seeds; 

 so that as soon as the fruiting is quite complete, 

 the plant dies down, having exhausted itself ut- 

 terly in the two short acts of flowering and seed- 

 bearing. During the remaining ten months of 

 the year or thereabouts, there are no more whit- 

 low-grasses at all in existence ; the species re- 

 mains dormant, as it were, for a whole long pe- 

 riod in the form of seeds lying buried in the soil, 



