If you peel the two skins off your almond-seed (the thick, brown, outside skin, and the thin, transparent one under it), the two halves of the almond will slip apart quite easily.  One of these halves will have a small dent at the pointed end, while in the other half you will see a little lump, which fitted into the dent when the two halves were joined.  This little lump (a b, Fig. 37) is a young plant, and the two halves of the almond are the seed leaves which hold the plantlet, and feed it till it can feed itself.  The rounded end of the plantlet (b) sticking out of the almond, is the beginning of the root, while the other end (a) will in time become the stem.  If you look carefully, you will see two little points at this end, which are the tips of future leaves.  Only think how minute this plantlet must be in a primrose, where the whole seed is scarcely larger than a grain of sand!  Yet in this tiny plantlet lies hid the life of the future plant.

When a seed falls into the ground, so long as the earth is cold and dry, it lies like a person in a trance, as if it were dead; but as soon as the warm, damp spring comes, and the busy little sun-waves pierce down into the earth, they wake up the plantlet and make it bestir itself.  They agitate to and fro the particles of matter in this tiny body, and cause them to seek out for other particles to seize and join to themselves.

But these new particles cannot come in at the roots, for the seed has none; nor through the leaves, for they have not yet grown up; and so the plantlet begins by helping itself to the store of food laid up in the thick seed-leaves in which it is buried.  Here it finds starch, oils, sugar, and substances called albuminoids, —­ the sticky matter which you notice in wheat-grains when you chew them is one of the albuminoids.  This food is all ready for the plantlet to use, and it sucks it in, and works itself into a young plant with tiny roots at one end, and a growing shoot, with leaves, at the other.

But how does it grow?  What makes it become larger?  To answer this you must look at the second thing I asked you to bring — a piece of orange.  If you take the skin off a piece of orange, you will see inside a number of long-shaped transparent bags, full of juice.  These we call cells, and the flesh of all plants and animals is made up of cells like these, only of various shapes.  In the pith of elder they are round, large, and easily seen (a, Fig. 39); in the stalks of plants they are long, and lap over each other (b, Fig. 39), so as to give the stalk strength to stand upright.  Sometimes many cells growing one on the top of the other break into one tube and make vessels.  But whether large or small, they are all bags growing one against the other.

In the orange-pulp these cells contain only sweet juice, but in other parts of the orange-tree or any other plant they contain a sticky substance with little grains in it.  This substance is called “protoplasm,” or the first form of life, for it is alive and active, and under a microscope you may see in a living plant streams of the little grains moving about in the cells.