NATURAL HISTORY READER, 



HOW PLANTS TRAVEL. 



1. Plants have both life and motion ; we dare not as 

 yet say whether it be the effect of a mere dream, of a. me- 

 chanical pressure from without, or of instinctive life with- 

 in. For what do we as yet know of the simplest functions 

 of the inner life of plants ? Who has not, however, ob- 

 served how the pale sap courses through the colossal stems 

 of gigantic trees and the delicate veins of a frail leaf, as 

 rapidly and marvelously as through the body of man ? 

 Take a microscope, and you will see the plant full of life 

 and motion. All its minute cells are filled with countless 

 little currents, now rotary and now up and down, often 

 even apparently lawless, but always distinctly marked by 

 tiny grains which are seen to turn in them or to rise with- 

 out ceasing. 



2. But plants move not only where they stand, they 

 travel also. They migrate from land to land, sometimes 

 slowly, inch by inch, then again on the wings of the storm. 

 Botanists tell us of actual migrations of plants, and a suc- 

 cessive extension of the domain of particular floras, just as 

 we speak of the migration of idioms and races. Individual 

 plants, however, travel only as man ought to travel, when 

 they are young. If they have once found a home, they 

 settle quietly down, grow, blossom, and bear fruit. There- 

 fore it is that plants travel only in the seed. For this pur- 

 pose, seeds possess often special organs for a long journey 

 through the air. 



3. Sometimes they are put, like small bomb-shells, into 

 little mortars, and fired off with great precision. Thus 

 arise the well-known emerald rings on our greenswards, and 

 on the vast prairies of the West, which some ascribe to elec- 

 tricity, while the poet loves to see in them traces of the 

 moonlight revels of fairies. The truth is scarcely less no- 



