The plants go to great lengths to secure an advantageous distribution of their offspring. The nature of a plant is to live by growing. When it has reached a prescribed height, it must continue the process by producing new individuals to carry on the cycle. It gives its children a start in the world by providing them with wings, bladders, feathers, spikes, thorns, sticky secretions, submarines, boats, and kites, according to the method of travel they are to use. Sometimes the matured pistil or fruit is dispersed entire. Sometimes it opens and shoots the seeds out. The Violet and Oxalis act like veritable guns, so vigorously do they expel their seeds. There are seed-capsules, like those of the Primrose and Xanthium Spinosum, which open at the top so that only a high and efficient wind can dislodge the seeds. The problem of food storage is an important one in plantdom. Annuals die when they have flowered and produced seed. Perennials wither but persist for a number of seasons and sometimes many years. Those whose stems or trunks are permanent withdraw their starch and chlorophyll into their cambium layer where it is safe from freezing. Those which die down to the ground each fall store up food material in underground stems and roots in sufficient amount to get a good start the following season. The Potato is an enlargement of the underground stem, but Carrots, Beets, and Turnips are bulbous roots. Hyacinths, Tulips, Daffodils, Snowdrops, Crocuses, and Buttercups all store food material in bulbs. Practically all wild flowers which come up early in the spring, feed upon the nutriment manufactured during the previous season. Buds represent the foliage of the coming season. Each fall, trees and bushes prepare for next year’s growth by putting forth miniature shoots and leaves folded up in warm brown overcoats. At spring’s urgent call, the buds have merely to cast aside their coverings and step out into the warm sunlight. These buds really make a tree a community of individuals, because each one is capable of reproducing everything that has occurred on the plant up to that point. This is the principle on which grafting is carried on. The most wonderful thing in all plant structure is the plant cell. There are anywhere from six thousand to twelve thousand of these living units to the square inch. In their restless, moving protoplasm lies the mystery of life--the directing energy which controls the plant’s activities and makes it a conscious, intelligent organism. [Illustration: IF THIS AGED CEDAR COULD TELL ITS LIFE’S STORY, WE WOULD FIND IT FULL OF ROMANCE AND ADVENTURE] CHAPTER III Migrations of Plants “_Race after race of leaves and men Bloom, wither and are gone; As winds and water rise and fall So life and death roll on._” We are so in the habit of thinking of plants as fixed and static things that it rarely occurs to us that they migrate over the earth’s surface quite as extensively as do men or animals.