Now, I want you children to see how many different ways you can recall in which plants scatter abroad their little seeds; and later I want you to go out into the garden, or into the woods, and see if you cannot discover many of the seeds about which you have been reading. But better still it would be if you could find others of which I have told you nothing. I should like you to make a list of the different plants which you find in fruit, putting after each name a slight description of the way in which it gets rid of its seeds. This will not be a stupid task at all if you set your mind to it. It will give your walks a new pleasure, and it will bring to your school work something of the freshness and joy which belong to the woods. PART II—YOUNG PLANTS [Illustration: Decoration] HOW THE BABY PLANT LIVES When these little seeds at last find a good resting place, what do you think happens to them? They grow into new plants, of course. But how does this come about? How does a seed turn into a plant? I could hardly expect you to guess this, any more than I could have expected you to guess how the apple flower changes into the apple fruit. I will tell you a little about it; and then I hope your teacher will show you real seeds and real plants, and prove to you that what I have said is really so. Of course, you believe already that I try to tell you the exact truth about all these things. But people far wiser than I have been mistaken in what they thought was true; and so it will be well for you to make sure, with your own eyes, that I am right in what I say. [Illustration: FIG. 84] If you should cut in two the seed of that beautiful flower the garden peony, and should look at it very closely through a good magnifying glass, you would find a tiny object such as you see in the half seed shown in this picture (Fig. 84). Both your eyes and your glass need to be very good to show you that this little object is _a baby peony plant_. Fig. 85 gives the little plant as it would look if taken out of the seed. Every ripe seed holds a baby plant; and to become a grown-up plant, it needs just what boy and girl babies need,—food and drink and air. But shut up so tight in its seed shell, how can it get these? Well, in this peony seed its food is close at hand. It is packed away inside the seed, all about the little plant. In the picture (Fig. 84), everything except the little white spot, which shows the plant, is baby food,—food that is all prepared to be eaten by a delicate little plant, and that is suited to its needs just as milk is suited to the needs of your little sister or brother. [Illustration: FIG. 85] The little leaves of the baby plant take in the food that is needed to make it grow fat and strong. Now, how does the baby plant get water to drink?