General 
bewildering variety of horrible little creatures found in 
decaying wood, or under the bark of fallen branches. 
They break up the useless and dead wood and return it 
to the soil in the form of rich and valuable manure. 
The fungi and bacteria living in the soil and about the 
roots are also most useful, for it is by their help that the 
tree-roots obtain a rich and quick supply of nitrates and 
other salts, 
So a wood is really an extremely puzzling and com- 
plicated co-operative society, in which there are numbers 
of quite distinct and different organisms, both animal 
and vegetable, engaged in a common task, and so far 
as we know entirely unthinking of anything except their 
own individual advantages. 
Even in one single plant, say, for instance, a Wood 
Anemone, which is a regular woodland flower, one finds 
the same difficult questions so soon as one begins to 
realise its manner of life. Its fleshy stem is wholly 
below ground, and the plant is out of sight during most 
of the year. This fleshy, scarred, underground stem is 
full of starchy material, which means that many of its 
cells are starch store-rooms. The roots attached to it 
which explore the leaf mould are assisted by a curious 
fungus (mycorhiza) which is of use to them. Such 
fungi grow more rapidly than roots, and are probably 
specialists and experts in the task of obtaining nitrate 
and other salts. The cells of the root therefore are 
devoted to supplying the fungus with sugar and the 
stem with water and salts in solution. 
The three leaflets raised above the spring vegetation 
by long stalks not only possess green cells which manu- 
facture sugar from carbonic acid and water, but they 
also contain special cells to toughen and strengthen 
the leaf and others which convey the formed material 
down to the stem. 
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