Flowers and their friends

by Margaret Warner Morley

Here, you see, gases unite and make a liquid. Well, chlorophyll has a way of its own of uniting the carbon it took away from the carbon dioxide with the hydrogen and oxygen it gets from the water and forming a solid, which the plant cannot live without.

Now what do you suppose this new solid is? Probably you never could guess.

It is starch, just starch!

Chlorophyll makes starch out of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.

Sometimes it makes sugar and oil out of them, but its work is most generally starch-making.

The carbon, you remember, it gets from the carbon dioxide of the air, and the hydrogen and oxygen from the water the roots send it.

The strangest thing about all this is, chlorophyll is the only thing that can make starch.

Perhaps you do not think starch worth making such a fuss about. But wait a moment.

There is more to starch than you ever dreamed of. Really and truly, if it were not for starch you would not be alive to-day, and I would not,—in short nobody would.