[Illustration: FIG. 90] Why is this? This is because the baby bean plant keeps its food in its own leaves. The seed coat of the bean is filled by these leaves, for each half of the bean is really a seed leaf. In these two thick leaves is stored all the food that is necessary to the life of the baby plant; and because of all this food which they hold, the bean plant is able to get a better start in life than many other young plants. If you soak and strip off its seed coat, and pull apart the two thick leaves, you will find a tiny pair of new leaves already started (Fig. 91); but you will see nothing of the sort in the seed of the morning-glory, for the reason that this is not so well stored with baby food as to be able to do more than get its seed leaves well under way. The pea, like the bean, is so full of food, that it also is able to take care of a second pair of leaves. But now to go back to the young bean plant in the schoolroom garden. We were wondering why the two halves of the bean, which are really the first pair of leaves, kept growing thinner and smaller as the second pair grew larger. [Illustration: FIG. 91] Perhaps you guess now the reason for this. These first leaves, called the seed leaves, feed all the rest of the young bean plant. Of course, as they keep on doing this, they must themselves shrink away; but they do not cease with their work till the plant is able to take care of itself. By this time, however, the seed leaves have nothing left to live upon. They die of starvation, and soon fade and disappear. So now you understand just what has happened to the leaves that once were so fat and large. And I hope you will remember the difference between the seed of the morning-glory and that of the bean,—how the morning-glory packs the baby food inside the seed, of course, but _outside_ the baby plant; while the bean packs it inside the two seed leaves, which are so thick that there is no room for anything else within the seed coat. But really, to understand all that I have been telling you, you must see it for yourselves; you must hold in your hands the dried bean; you must examine it, and make sure that its seed shell is filled entirely by the baby plant; you must see it grow plump and big from the water which it has been drinking; you must watch with sharp eyes for that first little rip in the seed coat, and for the putting-out of the tiny tip, which grows later into stem and root; you must notice how the bent stem straightens out, and lifts the thick seed leaves up into the air; and you must observe how that other pair of leaves, which grows from between the seed leaves, becomes larger and larger as the seed leaves grow smaller and thinner, and how, when the little plant is able to hold its own in the world, the seed leaves die away. And if day by day you follow this young life, with the real wish to discover its secret, you will begin to understand what the wise old florist tailor meant when he said,—