HOME PLANTS AND THEIR WAYS. 25 



THE HOSPITALITY OF PLANTS. 



1, As if in return for the manifold services which plants 

 require and receive from their fellow-creatures, they show 

 kindness of their own to animal life, and shelter and feed 

 the most timid as well as the noblest of beings with the 

 hospitality of their generous life. In early childhood al- 

 ready we are taught that even the smallest of seeds — the 

 mustard-seed — grows up to be a tree, ''in whose branches the 

 fowls of the heavens have their habitation," that "both 

 Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine 

 and under his fig-tree, all the days of Solomon," and that 

 Deborah, the prophetess, ''dwelt under a palm-tree. " Mod- 

 ern science has furnished as numerous striking and detailed 

 instances of the great variety of life which is thus inti- 

 mately connected with the vegetable kingdom. 



2. It is not only that the plaintive nightingale sings 

 in the murmuring poplar, while the gay butterfly loves the 

 sweet-scented rose, that the somber yew hides the owl's 

 nest, and the dark northern pine harbors the fur-clad 

 squirrel. Animals, invisible to the naked eye. have been 

 found to float in the sap of trees, and even the smallest 

 moss has its own tiny insect, which it boards and lodges. 

 Aphides and gall-insects live, in every sense of the word, 

 on the leaves of plants, flies and butterflies on their flow- 

 ers, and ants and worms crowd upon them, after death, in 

 countless multitudes. Every plant, moreover, is inhabited 

 by some insect to which it affords an exclusive home. Many 

 caterpillars are born and die with the leaf on which they 

 live, while, on the other hand, the proud monarch— oak — 

 alone supports seventy different kinds of insects, a swarm 

 which sets all measurement at defiance, and, moreover, re- 

 places by numbers and the enormous voracity with which 

 they are endowed, what they want in bodily magnitude. 



