It cannot have escaped the thoughtful reader that all of this chapter on plant behavior has dealt with those functions of plants in which roots, stems, or leaves play the chief part. These purely vegetative actions of plants, what might almost be called their bread and butter activities, would never lead to perpetuating their kind. For while all of these functions are necessary, except certain apparently wayward movements which still remain unexplained, they are in a sense only the preparation for an infinitely more important act, the reproduction of their kind. What the poetic have called the love of the flowers, or in more prosaic but perhaps more truthful words the fertilization, pregnancy, and birth of the new race, will be considered in a separate chapter. No other act of the plant world is so interesting as the mechanism of reproduction, the almost endless devices for securing it, and the ingenuity of nature in seeing to it that there are no flukes. CHAPTER III HOW PLANTS PRODUCE THEIR YOUNG There is perhaps no device of nature that more perfectly accomplishes its purpose than the one with which all living things are endowed--the instinct for the renewal of life. In man the dawn of the mating instinct has ever been the theme of poets, and some of its manifestations are the despair of ascetics. Through it some of the noblest of man’s emotions have arisen, and because of its perversion our daily newspapers chronicle the basest and most sordid tragedies. But whether noble or ignoble, this instinct for mating is, in its simplest terms, only a provision of nature that all life contains within itself the means of renewing life. Without this, life, so far as we know it, would end with the present generation. Perhaps our understanding of this decree of an all-wise nature to increase and multiply will be heightened by looking at it not only from its familiar manifestations in man, but more broadly. Seen from this broader viewpoint, it is the inherent legacy of all living things from the dawn of life on the earth down to the present. Even the simplest one-celled organisms have the faculty of increasing. In all plants, both the flowerless ones and those producing flowers, the process is carried to a perfection almost unbelievable in its intricacy and in provisions against its failure. From the matings of flowers much may be gleaned; even man himself can learn from them the capacity for sacrifice, the sinking of individual aims and pleasures in the greater scheme of conforming to that necessity for renewal of the race upon which all progress must be based.