Almost the first thing that you will notice about a plant is its color. The little child, before it can speak, will hold out its hands for a bright red rose, or a golden lily. I think the color is one of the most wonderful things about a plant. Come into the field. Here you see a yellow buttercup, growing near a white daisy. Beside them is a red rose. Close by, blooms a great purple flower. All grow out of the same earth, and breathe the same air. Yet how they differ in color. Some flowers have two or three colors upon each petal. Have you not seen the tulip with its striped blossoms, and the petunias spotted with white and red? The flower of the cotton plant changes in color. Within a few days this flower appears in three distinct hues. The chicory blossom changes from blue to nearly white as the day grows warm. Look at your mother’s roses. Some are white, others are red, pink, or yellow. None are ever blue. Then look at a wild-rose tree. The root and stem are brown. The green color is in the leaves, and in some of the stems. The petals are red. The stamens and pistils are yellow. You never saw the red color get astray and run into the leaves. The leaf-green did not lose itself, and travel up to the petals. The stamens and pistils did not turn brown instead of golden. Does not that seem a wonder, now that you think of it? Perhaps you never noticed it before. It is one thing to see things, and another to notice them so that you think about them. Here is another fact about color in plants. All summer you see that the leaves are green. In the autumn they begin to change. You wake up some fine frosty morning and the tree leaves are all turned red, yellow, brown, or purple. It is a fine sight. It is the going away of the leaf-green from the leaf that begins the change of leaf-color in the fall. The leaves have done growing. Their stems are hard and woody. They do not breathe as freely as they did. The sap does not run through them as it did early in the season. The leaf-green shrinks up in the cells. Or, it goes off to some other part of the plant. Sometimes part of it is destroyed. Then the leaves begin to change. Sometimes a red sap runs into the leaf cells. Or, an oily matter goes there, in place of the “leaf-green.” The leaf-green changes color if it gets too much oxygen. In the autumn the plant does not throw out so much oxygen. What it keeps turns the leaf-green from green to red, yellow, or brown. The bright color in plants is not in the flower alone. You have seen that roots and seeds have quite as bright colors as blossoms. What flowers are brighter than many fruits are? The cherry is crimson, or pink, or nearly black. What a fine yellow, red, purple, we find in plums! Is there any yellow brighter than that of the Indian corn? Is there a red gayer than you find on the apples you like so well? What is more golden than a heap of oranges?