“But to start over again.  A plant has just three necessary and important parts:  these parts are the roots, stem, and leaves.  No, Elizabeth, the fruit and flowers are not separate parts.  Why?  Well, merely because by some queer provision of the plant world, the leaves are responsible for making or forming both the flower and the fruit.  If you watch a bud form and unfold, you will notice that the entire little bud seems to be a series of leaves.  And if your fingers were clever enough you could take tiny leaves and fold them into the parts which go to make up the flower and the fruit.  This last, like most of the rest of that I am telling you, is just one of the miracles of nature.

“The root, rootlets and root hairs all go to make up the root-system of a plant.  This system is a feeding and food storage system; cold storage, we might call it.

“I have spoken before about how the root hairs absorb food.  Food is soaked up something as a blotter soaks up ink.  Underground plant food must be liquid in nature.  This is because plants, like babies, must have very dilute food.  Plants can no more get food out of a dry lump of soil than a little baby can get its food from a hunk of bread or a thick slice of corn beef.  But let that soil be water-soaked, and have the proper bacteria at work, and the material is in plant-food form.  Josephine has here an old, old experiment.  What was a white pink is now a red one.  It has been in that glass of red ink and a little water.  And lo, up the stem the red fluid climbed until it suffused the white flower and made it red.  Notice as Miriam holds that lump of sugar only just touching the surface of the water, the water moves up that lump.  In this way water and liquid food rise up the stems of plants.  Just so, too, water rises in the soil from the lower layers up to the feeding place of the roots, and even up to the surface of the ground.

“As the roots are feeding and storing places, so the stem is a sort of passage way for the passing back and forth of liquids.  Take a stem of a big plant, like an oak tree, and you see in the wood where storage of fibre has gone on.  But the great work is that of interchange.

“Leaves are very active portions of the plant.  They represent a great, busy manufactory.  Manufacturing what?  That question I see stamped on Myron’s face so plainly he need not speak it out.  Manufacturing real food out of raw material—­that is the work of these plant shops.

“Let me tell you about this.  Ethel has in her hands two little plants.  The one in her right hand has been growing in the light; the other, in her left hand, has been put away in the dark to grow.  The absence of green colour is very marked in this latter plant.  So you see it takes light to form this green, or chlorophyll as it is called.  The chlorophyll-saturated cells, absorbing carbonic acid and the water-diluted food from the soil, literally break them up.  And when broken, food is found suitable for plants to absorb.  Wonderful, is it not?