THE STEM 35- 



VI.— THE STEM.— Paet I. 



1. It is rare to find a boy in England who can 

 handle an axe, but nearly every Australian boy knows 

 how to make the chips fly. But not every boy can 

 read the story of the wood he is chopping. And yet 

 it is a wonderful story. One man looks at a great 

 gum tree that has fallen to the axe and says . " It 

 will burn well;" another says: "It will split into 

 good palings ; " a third : " It will make good railway 

 sleepers ; " and then comes a man who looks at the 

 rings of the tree and says : " Here is the diary that 

 the tree kept. It has been keeping this story of its 

 life for a thousand years. Look ! " — and here he 

 points to a place where the rings are all close together, 

 " that was a time of drought when the tree made little 

 growth ; and here, where the rings are wide, is a time 

 of good years when the sap ran free. Eor ten 

 centuries the 'keets have come to its honey-pots in the 

 time of flower ; magpies and crows innumerable have 

 perched on its branches, and thirty generations of 

 blackfellows have climbed up to the nest of the 

 opossum." Who would not learn to read a story like 

 this? 



2. First, then, let us ask, What has the stem of a 

 plant to do ? It has two things to do : to hold the 

 leaves and flowers up in the air, and to act as a 

 channel for the sap. Eirst of all we are to see how 

 the stem holds the leaves and flowers up in the air. 



3. The stem as a leaf-supporter. If you try to 

 count the leaves on a great tree you will soon stop :. 



