If you live in town, go and look at the seeds in the seed-man’s window. If you live in the country, suppose you collect all the seeds you can. Did you ever think in how many ways seeds are kept from harm? What is a melon, or a pumpkin, but a big seed box? “Oh!” you say, “melons and pumpkins are good to eat!” So they are, the better luck for us, that is. But all the plant wants of these big things, is to hold the precious seed. An apple is a nice fleshy case to hold the seeds in the core. The cherry and plum are softer seed bags, which hold hard pits. Did you ever look at a blackberry? You saw it was made up of little balls or knobs. Each of these soft, sweet knobs holds a tiny seed. A strawberry is quite different. The strawberry is a sweet red cone. Look, it is sprinkled all over with little yellow dots! Each of these dots is a seed. I will tell you a little about the “why” of all this, in some other lesson. You see the seed is that without which the plant cannot make a new plant. Without seeds there would soon be no more plants. The leaves are those parts without which the plant cannot live and grow. But I think I hear some sharp child say, “How about those plants that have no leaves?” In the few plants that have no leaves, the stem may help to serve in their place. But most of the few plants that have no leaves fasten upon other plants, and grow upon them. They use the leaves of those other plants to do their work. In these simple lessons, I tell you of only common things. I speak of the things that you can see each day. For the rare things you must go to larger books. You know from your last lessons that leaves are the stomach of the plant. Leaves are also the plant’s lungs. Plants must breathe. They must breathe in and out, as you do. Also the plants must get rid of the water which they do not need after they have taken the food out of it. Much of this water passes out through the leaves. You know when you are very warm, you feel a moisture come on your skin. That was once water in your blood. It creeps out through tiny pores over all your skin. The plant skin has such pores. The water goes off through them. When the plant breathes out this water, then more hurries up through the cells to take its place. So the sap keeps running up and down all the time. Plants not only send out water through the pores of the leaves, but also a kind of air or gas. If they did not do that, we should soon all be dead. Can I make that plain to you? Did you ever hear your mother say, “The air here is bad or close”? Did you ever see your teacher open a door or a window, to “_air_” the schoolroom? If you ask why, you will be told “So many people breathing here make the air bad.” How does our breathing make the air bad? When our blood runs through our bodies it takes up little bits of matter that our bodies are done with. This stuff makes the blood dark and thick. But soon the blood comes around to our lungs.