10 FIRST STUDIES IN PLANT LIFE 



box of earth, and keep the earth and the saw-dust 

 moist. By this plan you can watch the seeds grow- 

 ing as easily as you can watch bees in a glass hive. 



7. The scar on the seed. And now while we are 

 waiting for the seed to grow, let us look again at a 

 whole French bean. You notice the rounded back and 

 that the opposite side is hollowed and has a scar. 

 (See fig. 4.) If you have ever helped to sheU beans 

 or peas you will guess at once that the scar is the 

 point where the bean was fixed to the pod. 



8. A seed with a large plantlet. Examine also 

 peas and broad beans and then spht them open. In 



all these cases the plantlet is small ; but if 

 you will open a castor-oil seed, you will find 

 a plantlet as long as the seed itself. 

 Eemove the beautiful mottled outer skin of 

 the castor-oil seed, and then, with knife or 

 finger nail, break the seed gently into its 

 halves. If you have done this carefully, 

 you will now see on one of the halves the 

 stem, and above it the leaf of the plantlet. 

 Stem and leaf together cover the whole space. Use 

 now your lens and you will see distinctly the veining 

 of the leaf. Note also the tiny leaf-ruff just above the 

 stem. This is the first pair of true leaves of the 

 castor-oil seedling. 



9. The little root in the seed. Coming back to 

 the split French bean, we must now look for the little 

 root below the plantlet. This root is so placed that it 

 comes out of the seed-skin by a little door near the 

 scar. Allow a whole bean to germinate, and you will 

 see the tiny white root pushing through this little 



