"Sort of a slender diet," remarked Roger, who was blessed with a hearty appetite.
"The leaves give it a lot of food. I was reading in a book on botany the other day that the elm tree in Cambridge, Massachusetts, under which Washington reviewed his army during the Revolution was calculated to have about seven million leaves and that they gave it a surface of about five acres. That's quite a surface to eat with!"
"Some mouth!" commented Roger.
"If each one of you will pick a leaf you'll have in your hand an illustration of what I say," suggested Helen.
They all provided themselves with leaves, picking them from the plants and shrubs and trees around them, except Ethel Blue, who already had a lily of the valley leaf with some flowers pinned to her blouse.
"When a leaf has everything that belongs to it it has a little stalk of its own that is called a petiole; and at the foot of the petiole it has two tiny leaflets called stipules, and it has what we usually speak of as 'the leaf' which is really the blade."
They all noted these parts either on their own leaves or their neighbors', for some of their specimens came from plants that had transformed their parts.
"What is the blade of your leaf made of?" Helen asked Ethel Brown.
"Green stuff with a sort of framework inside," answered Ethel, scrutinizing the specimen in her hand.