While today it is no longer the fashion to believe that plants were created for man’s _sole_ benefit, yet it cannot be denied that, because of their physical limitations and inferior intelligence, the plants frequently become very docile servants of the human race, thereby thriving mightily and to their own great advantage. This is as it should be. It is a law of earthly life. The danger lies in the contempt which this servitude engenders in the consciousness of man, the master. The plants are inferiors but very wonderful inferiors. We should accord them the highest respect. We should accept our dominion over them as a favour of a beneficent Providence,--a priceless gift which it is criminal to squander or misuse. CHAPTER I Origin of Plants “_’Tis a quaint thought, and yet perchance, Sweet blossoms, ye have sprung From flowers that over Eden once Their pristine fragrance flung._” “In the beginning God created the heaven and earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light!” There is no greater mystery than the mystery of creation. Nowhere is its story told more eloquently and more scientifically than in the opening words of Genesis. All the fruitage of centuries of research but reaffirms this ancient narrative. In the early days of this planet, when its crust was scarcely hardened from the molten state, there reigned what might be called the age of water. The entire surface of the globe was covered with a sea of restless, moving liquid, overcharged with a heavy atmosphere of vapour, so dense that not a single ray of light could penetrate it. As the process of cooling went on, more and more moisture condensed out of the air, until finally the first ray of light reached the universal sea and terrestrial day began. Here in this dim, watery world, about the time that the first land began to emerge from the deep, by some divine, mysterious agency, the first life was born. No doubt it was one-celled, free-moving, and like modern Flagellates, partaking of the nature of both plant and animal. Slowly, and in response to evolutionary promptings, simple aquatic plant forms began to develop from the primary single cells. Animal life may have begun a simultaneous development, but if it did, it did not become strong enough to make any impress on the geologic rock from which we draw our data. Certainly the plants were in the ascendency. The mobile green Algae were characteristic of the time. It is a remarkable thing that though they are probably the progenitors of all that vast world of vegetable life which enriches the world today, the Algae have always gone on reproducing their own kind. Today we can watch, under a microscope, the activities of the first form of terrestrial life, born incalculable aeons ago.