The beautiful leaves, fringed with downy hairs, are the lungs of the plants; and just as the blood runs through the veins at the back of your hand, the sap: which is the life-blood of the plant, runs through some fine veins which you see at the back of the leaf. If this sap were to cease flowing up the stem, the leaves and flowers would soon droop and die.
[Illustration: GREEN PASTURES.]
Look at the sheep, cropping the grass so busily that they hardly lift their heads from the ground. Every time they breathe, they give out air which feeds all the green things around them; and as the green things breathe this air, by the very act they purify it, and give it back to the sheep, fit for them to inhale again.
We see that when God made the world, everything was prepared beforehand. He did not cause the earth to bring forth living things, until all that was needful to keep them alive was ready. Before the beasts of the field were made, the grass, which was to be their food, covered the earth like a soft carpet, and their table was furnished. This is a lesson which we have already learnt, when speaking of "The Ocean of Air"—but it is one of which we cannot be too often reminded.
And now I want to point out to you that in the eleventh verse we read of three kinds of living things which God caused the earth to bring forth. Let us look at them: (1) "grass"; (2) "the herb yielding seed"; (3) "the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed was in itself."
Long ago, when I first noticed these three distinct kinds, I could not understand why there was a difference made between "grass" and "the herb yielding seed"; for the grass in our fields in autumn is, as little May said, "all full of pips." This was her way of describing those beautiful seeds which hang so gracefully that we sometimes gather the long stalks and dry them for their beauty, that we may have a winter nosegay when there are no flowers to be found. I had forgotten my puzzle about this when, not long ago, I met with a very interesting book which explained that the grass which is spoken of in Genesis as the first thing which the earth brought forth, was not the grass of our fields. If you look in the margin of your Bible, you will see that it is there called "tender grass." You might perhaps think there is not much difference; but words, which are the names of things, are very strong for good or evil. And especially in reading the Bible, it is important to get the very best English word that can be found for the Hebrew words which we could not understand. The verse has been more exactly turned from Hebrew into English in this way: "And God said. Let the earth sprout forth with tender grass."
This word "tender grass" is not the same as that which is used in a Psalm which the children were just then learning, where we read that God "causeth the grass to grow for the cattle." It means rather "the plant that shoots" out of the ground, and would apply to any green thing just sprouting. It is thought that in the word are included all those plants such as mosses and mushrooms, whose flowers are invisible, and which multiply not by producing seed, but by budding, or by means of little living particles, looking like brown dust, which botanists call "spores."
These flowerless plants are of much simpler structure than those which have root, stem, leaf and flower, and produce plants of their own kind by means of their seeds. If you look at the back of a common fern, you will see brown specks, not bigger than silkworms' eggs, beautifully arranged upon it. Each of these is a collection of little cases containing spores, which by-and-by will split open, allowing the spores to fall into the ground.
"Then the spores are the same as seeds, after all"—you say. No; if they were seeds, each would at once grow into a fern. This is what happens, as far as I can explain it to you: from the spore springs a tiny leaf, which roots itself, and it is from this green leaf that the young fern actually grows, until it, as it were, begins life on its own account. The leaf dies down, and the first frond of the new fern peeps above ground, closely coiled up, as you have often seen, if you have been through the woods in spring-time. The earliest forms of vegetable life, then, brought forth by the earth at the word of God were the plants which have no seeds: botanists have divided such plants into groups—the seaweeds and lichens, the mosses, and the ferns.
Of the seaweeds, the lowest of all groups of plants, we were speaking some time ago. The lichens, though such lowly plants, are very interesting, for I have read that every form of lichen is composed of two distinct plants—a seaweed and a fungus—so closely interwoven that you cannot tell where the one ends and the other begins. The lichens range in colour from white to yellow, red, green, brown—and some are as black as that rare black pansy of which I told you. Each kind has its own peculiar way of growing, and these hardy little plants can live where no other plant can—on the hard black lava, on naked rocks, and even upon the highest snow-mountain.