The cycle of plant life can be illustrated by any dicotyledonous, herbaceous annual. If one is so inclined he may hark back to his high school days and plant a few Beans in a box as a practical illustration of the facts stated here. The first action of the planted Bean is to absorb water to a prodigious amount, and so wake the quiescent life forces which may have been slumbering within it for years. It is a law of animal and vegetable life that all vital processes must be performed in solution. Without water, life is dead or somnolent. When Nature made the Bean, she left a small opening or window in its skin-wall called the micropyle. Through this opening of the water-swollen seed, now issue two pale sprouts. One is long and pointed; it is the radicle or incipient root. The other is stubbier and is tipped by a cluster of folded, yellow-green leaves; it is the plumule or incipient stem. With unerring exactness, the radicle grows down into the soil and the plumule feels its way up into the air. By this time, the seed has burst its walls and split into two halves, which indicates that it belongs to the dicotyledonous group of plants. As the seedling continues to grow, these cotyledons begin to shrink and shrivel. The plant is living on their substance until it can begin to make its own. In the case of the Bean, the stem lifts the emaciated cotyledons up into the air, where they act as leaves until the tiny green things at the stem’s tip have expanded into those important organs. When the first leaves have fully opened and the spent cotyledons have dropped off as mere empty shells, the independent life of the plant may be said to have begun. We are now in a position to examine its methods of living. Examining the root, we find that by this time it has expanded into many branches. Each tip is a tiny mouth through which the plant drinks the all-important water and mineral salts. Root tips exercise great ingenuity; they feel their way underground, touching here, recoiling there, and searching out the elements necessary to the plant’s economy with wonderful sagacity. The actual absorption is done by minute filaments or hairs which take in water and its dissolved contents by osmotic action. They secrete a digestive fluid which renders certain minerals soluble, and by a strange intelligence, select the kind and amount of material they take in. In certain groups of plants, notably the Legumes, colonies of Bacteria take the place of root hairs, and by a reciprocal action, provide the plant with the nitrogenous elements which it craves. The principal food of most vital importance taken in by the roots is nitrogen. Nitrogen is one of the basic elements of protoplasm, the life fluid of the living cell. Where there is life, there is nitrogen. Sulphur, phosphorous, silica, iron and other elements are also needed in small quantities.