98 AUTUMN AND WINTER 



different plants. The kexes are full of it. You see it in 

 the purple spots, which give so poisonous a look to the 

 stems of the hemlock. It appears more beautifully in the 

 leaves of the common kexes, chervil or cow's parsley, on 

 which odd leaves capriciously assume a hue of gorgeous 

 purple. 



These reds and purples, probably always present as 

 matter within the leaves, become vivid as soon as the green 

 chlorophyll is gone. Autumn colouring is indeed the outward 

 sign of a migration, or one might say a hibernation, which 

 has more than a fanciful parallel with autumn habits in the 

 animal kingdom. Waste is not Nature's way, except where 

 reproduction is concerned. When the leaves, those slight 

 but perfectly designed factories for the manufacture of carbon 

 and chlorophyll, have done their part, the stuff is all trans- 

 ferred to the solid and permanent members of the tree. A 

 ' migration ' botanists use the word begins, and by the 

 same paths that the sap flowed up the chlorophyll flows 

 back. When it has left the leaf the colours previously hid 

 appear. With the eyes or with the microscope this may 

 best be seen on the spindle leaf from which the green 

 flows back by partial streams, leaving curious streaks and 

 layers. One part of the leaf will be deep green, another purple, 

 another almost a brick red. The quick contrast of green 

 and red makes very gorgeous the floor of the Alps when 

 autumn comes, when the bearberry and a host of other 

 ground plants give the slope quite as gorgeous a carpet 

 as the spring flowers themselves. The ground is not less 

 gorgeous in Newfoundland, and the leaves of the wild 

 currant, which combine as many tints, though not in quite 

 such abrupt contrast, as the spindle-tree itself. When this 

 is complete in the elm the leaves are left pure yellow. But 

 this colour is not due to any definite matter provided among 



