THE QUEST FOR PLANTS 67 



the autumn stores of highly concentrated nourish- 

 ment, such as starch and oil, within their tissues. 

 Having done this they hibernate, and such food as 

 they require until the next spring is supplied out of 

 these reserves. 



The larger plants afford nourishment to larger 

 or more active animals, and there is hardly a weed 

 or flower or tree that does not support a varied 

 assemblage of adherents. The tangles of submarine 

 groves of seaweed and pondweed are cropped by fish 

 and scoured by snails. Every part of land plants — 

 the roots and young succulent leaves, the nectar, the 

 sap, the fruits, wood, and even the galls — furnishes 

 nourishment to insects and their young. Nor is the 

 plant merely food to them. Shelter can be found in 

 the innumerable crevices of bark and leaf. Air is 

 afforded by the spaces and tubes that traverse the 

 tissues. The very sheddings of plants are true wind- 

 falls for other creatures. The bud-scales of spring, 

 the leaves and fruits of autumn, all the fine debris 

 that rain down on to the earth beneath, are gathered 

 by ants and birds, eaten by slugs, and remoulded by 

 worms. Weed jetsam is similarly refined. The ebb- 

 tide, that leaves the seaweed stranded in heaps, exposes 

 the burrows of innumerable hungry scavengers in the 

 sand. Each evening, when the tide serves, the sand- 

 hoppers creep out of their hiding-places near high- 

 water mark and begin their mazy dance in search 

 of drift-weed ; whilst myriads of smaller shrimps, 

 each enclosed in a minute bivalve shell, career 



