Just as we can have too much of a good thing, it is possible for plants to have too much direct sunlight. In open spaces, where the struggle for life centers not about the fight for light but over other matters, we find leaves actually protecting themselves against too much exposure, and by a variety of ingenious ways. The texture of the upper or lower side, the kind of hair growing on their surface, and the number and size of their pores, are the most usual ways of leaves arming themselves against an oversupply of the one thing that their neighbors in the cool forest fight to the death to obtain. There seems to be a fatality against which plants, like ourselves, are nearly helpless. Their attempts to overcome it, again like our own struggles against an apparently overmastering fate, develop those characteristics that insure survival to the fittest, death to the puny or unaccommodating. We could hardly leave the subject of light and plants’ relation to it without mentioning, perhaps, the most remarkable case of adaptation to peculiar light conditions. All those aquatic plants that grow beneath the surface of the water need and get much less light than ordinary land plants. But from the island of Madagascar comes the lace leaf or water yam, which grows in quiet pools that are mostly in the depths of the tropical forest. Add to the dense shade cast upon the gloomy surface of such ponds the amount of light naturally lost in its passage through the water, and we get some notion of the singularly secluded home of this aquatic plant. What, now, is nature’s response to these peculiar conditions? How do the leaves of this well-shaded inhabitant of quiet pools behave? Their leaves are about a foot long and three or four inches wide, quite unnecessarily large for a submersed aquatic, but they consist _wholly of veins_. There is no “meat” to the leaf, none of that soft, green tissue so familiar in ordinary leaves. The conditions under which it is doomed to live almost seem as if it recognized the futility of having a broad expanse of the usually constituted leaf blade to expose to a light which is not there. It is significant that this skeletonized condition is permanent, the leaf functions much as ordinary aquatic leaves do, but its network of quite naked veins almost seems a mute protest against its fate. The delicate, lacelike “foliage” of this aquatic adds a touch of beauty to one of the most curious plants in the world. 2. HOW PLANTS GET THEIR FOOD AND WATER FROM THE EARTH