ABSORPTION AND TRANSPIRATION. IQI 



little plant or embryo lives upon until it has burst its 

 seed coat, and settled itself in the world to enjoy 

 plant life as its parents did before it. Yes, until its 

 plumule, becomes a stem, and its radicle a root, 

 so that it can take its own food from soil and 

 atmosphere, it feeds upon the store food with which 

 its thoughtful parent has supplied it, from endosperm, 

 or perisperm, or cotyledon store as the case may be 

 (p. 154). You can easily notice the testa of the wheat 

 or bean seed becoming more and more empty and 

 withered as the little plantlet grows. 



You can see the same kind of thing also in the tuber 

 of the potato or the orchis, as the young buds grow 

 and live upon the treasured food. 



So now we have come to the young plant, fairly 

 started and continuing to grow according to the 

 methods and laws of plant life, about which I am 

 going to tell you. 



What then is the food of plants ? In the first place, 

 it is composed of certain gases, such as oxygen and 

 nitrogen, and of certain solids, such as sulphur and 

 iron, which are mixed up with a great deal of water 

 into liquid food. For plants take up food by their 

 roots from the earth in which they grow, and the roots 

 can only take it in a liquid form. Now let us pull 

 up some common plant and look at the thinner fibres 

 of its root ; with a magnifying glass you can some- 

 times see their root hairs (p. 73) growing from the 

 epidermal cell's ; and notice also how particles of soil 



