THE MICROSCOPE AND PLANT LIFE 



place of the bloom in such plants as the cabbage. i| 

 There are thousands of plants with hairy leaves and 

 they will provide as many interesting objects for our 

 microscope. Let us examine as many as we can for 

 the hairy covering of each plant will be a little 

 different to the one we examined previously. There 

 are simple hairs, quite ordinary affairs, forked hairs, 

 branched hairs, T-shaped, star-shaped and club- 

 shaped hairs. If we are clever with our micro- 

 scope we shall notice that, however complex each 

 hair may be it is really nothing but one cell of the 

 skin of the leaf which has assumed a peculiar shape. 



The leaves of the nettle are armed with ordinary 

 and stinging hairs; the latter are worth examining 

 and we shall notice that there is one great differ- 

 ence between all the other hairs we have examined 

 and the stinging hairs of the nettle. The former are 

 of one cell only, the latter of several cells. A high 

 magnification will show that the stinging hair of the 

 nettle is not quite so simple as it appears at first 

 sight. 



There are plants whose leaves are protected by 

 very thick skins and others whose leaves become 

 armed with hard flinty matter, so that they resemble 

 stones rather than leaves. 



If we can find some quite young seedlings we must 

 manage to secure one or more for examination under 

 our microscope. We must take one up very care- 

 fully and wash the earth from its roots — if we pull 

 the earth away our specimen will be ruined. Near 

 the tips of the root branches we shall see something 



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