1 62 THE FAIRY-LAND OF SCIENCE. 
water is no longer carried up. The green cells can no 
longer get food to digest, and they themselves are 
broken up by the sunbeams and turn yellow, and the 
plant dies. 
But many plants are more industrious than the 
stock and mignonette, and lay by store for another 
year, and our primrose is one of these. Look at this 
thick solid mass below the primrose leaves, out of 
which the roots spring.* This is really the stem of 
the primrose hidden underground, and all the starch, 
albuminoids, &c., which the plant can spare as it 
grows, are sent down into this underground stem and 
stored up there, to lie quietly in the ground through 
the long winter, and then when the warm spring comes 
this stem begins to send out leaves for a new plant. 
We have now seen how a plant springs up, feeds 
itself, grows, stores up food, withers, and dies ; but we 
have said nothing yet about its beautiful flowers or 
how it forms its seeds. If we look down close to the 
bottom of the leaves in a primrose root in spring-time, 
we shall always find three or four little green buds 
nestling in among the leaves, and day by day we may 
see the stalk of these buds lengthening till they reach 
up into the open sunshine, and then the flower opens 
and shows its beautiful pale-yellow crown. 
We all know that seeds are formed in the flower, 
and that the seeds are necessary to grow into new 
plants. But do we know the history of how they 
are formed, or what is the use of the different parts 
of the bud ? Let us examine them all, and then I 
* See the plant in the foreground of the heading of the lecture. 
