96 Field, Forest, and Wayside Flowers 
ize and disappear, and then the hapless plant be- 
gins to starve to death. 
For the office of chlorophyll in the vegetable 
economy is digestion. By its action lifeless gases 
and lifeless mineral-matter are changed into living 
vegetable tissue. 
Green is essentially the color of life. Wherever 
we see it in the living world we know that in- 
organic substances are being changed into organic 
substances, and thus life is preparing the material 
which it will mould into many forms. 
The tissues built up by green plants feed herbiv- 
orous animals, which in their turn feed carnivor- 
ous animals, and so vegetable life mediates be- 
tween the mineral and the animal worlds. 
Organisms which have no chlorophyll are entirely 
dependent for their food upon organisms which 
have chlorophyll. The living chain binding the 
live creature to Mother Earth may have as many 
links as there are in the chain of phases connect- 
ing the ‘priest all shaven and shorn” with ‘‘the 
house that Jack built." But always at the end of 
the chain we find a green plant. 
In the teeming life of the ocean the same rule 
holds, for marine flesh-eaters feed upon marine 
vegetarians, and these in their turn are fed by 
