Every plant has racial and family traits, and each one also has a marked personality. If immortality is a fulfilling, a conserving continuance of the present earthly existence, then the plants deserve and have a right to expect a chance for infinite development.
The plants serve to make this earth a floral paradise. Why should they not be equally necessary in a world of spirit? It is to man’s credit that he has always pictured heaven as a place made beautiful by great hosts of trees and flowers.
CHAPTER XV
Plants and Men
“Our human souls
Cling to the grass and water brooks.”
—Athanase
The average city man gives little thought or attention to his vegetable neighbours, yet their continued existence is quite as vital to him as the air he breathes. Directly or indirectly he is utterly dependent upon them.
Every time he sits down to a dinner table, he is paying an unconscious tribute to the food-producing abilities of plantdom. In a general way, plants are the world’s food producers and the animals are the consumers. Plants are able to build up living tissue from inorganic material. Animals must prey upon that elaborated structure to keep themselves alive. Plants separate oxygen from carbon dioxide and water, thereby storing up sunshine as potential energy. Animals reverse the process, and, re-combining oxygen with the plant tissue, liberate heat and power. In a desert region, animals soon perish, because even carnivorous species live on herbivorous fellows which in turn are eaters of plants. This is why the distribution of men and animals is so greatly influenced by that of plants.
For clothing man depends partly upon such plant-products as Cotton and Flax and partly on plant-fed animals which yield him silk, wool and leather. The great plant structures of the forest give him the chief materials which go into the construction of his ships and houses, with all their appurtenances. The bodies of plants, recently alive or the bodies of plants long since dead furnish fuel for cooking, heating and power. Drugs are very largely of vegetable origin. In brief, the plants feed, clothe, shelter, and warm mankind.
Man has made many plants his servants. His first attention was naturally given to such species as he could use for food. Two thousand years ago, the ancients were growing practically all the food plants that are known today. Maize, Potatoes, Rice, Beans, Dates and Bananas have been cultivated for an even longer period. Fodder plants, calculated to furnish food for man’s domestic animals, were the next to receive attention, and following those, medical plants, edible fruits, garden vegetables and aromatic leaves and seeds, such as Tea and Coffee, came to the fore.
When we consider that plants display superior powers in so many directions and, as F. L. Sargent says, “do to perfection so many things we cannot do at all,” it is really remarkable that man has so completely subjected them to his will. Because of their static condition, they are quite helpless in his hands. He levels their grandest forests and burns their widest prairies. Certain plants he makes his pets, fighting their enemies and nurturing them in the most careful way. The tender Wheat would never be able to occupy the vast stretches it does through its own strength. Under man’s guidance and protection, its volume is increased a thousand fold.