Fig. 85
The little leaves of the baby plant take in the food that is needed to make it grow fat and strong.
Now, how does the baby plant get water to drink?
I have asked your teacher to soak over night some peas that have been dried for planting, and to bring to school to-day a handful of these, and also a handful which have not been soaked. She will pass these about, and you can see how different the soaked ones are from the others. Those that have not been in the water look dried and wrinkled and old, almost dead in fact; while those which have been soaked are nearly twice as large. They look fat, and fresh, and full of life. Now, what has happened to them?
Why, all night long they have been sucking in water through tiny openings in the seed shell; and this water has so refreshed them, and so filled the wrinkled coats and swelled them out, that they look almost ready to burst.
So you see, do you not, how the water manages to get inside the seed so as to give the baby plant a drink?
Usually it is rather late in the year when seeds fall to the earth. During the winter the baby plant does not do any drinking; for then the ground is frozen hard, and the water cannot reach it. But when the warm spring days come, the ice melts, and the ground is full of moisture. Then the seed swells with all the water it sucks in, and the baby plant drinks, drinks, drinks, all day long.
You scarcely need ask how it keeps warm, this little plant. It is packed away so snugly in the seed shell, and the seed shell is so covered by the earth, and the earth much of the time is so tucked away beneath a blanket of snow, that usually there is no trouble at all about keeping warm.
Fig. 86