Plants and their children

by Frances Theodora Parsons

But a plant must breathe as well as eat; for when it breathes, it takes in the precious oxygen which is just as necessary to its life as to ours.

In summer, by the dusty roadside, you see plants almost white with dust, looking quite ill and lifeless.

And they are both ill and lifeless; for their little leaf throats are so choked that they cannot breathe in the oxygen they need, and in consequence they are being slowly suffocated.

THE DILIGENT TREE

Now we have learned three things about plants, and especially about leaves. We have learned—

1. That they perspire.

2. That they eat and drink.

3. That they breathe.

They perspire when the water passes through the leaf mouths into the air.

They eat when Leaf Green and Sunbeam together manage to take the carbon out of the carbonic-acid gas which has made its entrance through the leaf mouth and the cell wall. They drink when the roots suck in water and earth broth.