"A great deal of plant food is in the form of sugars and starches. I remember Katharine and Peter told me last winter that in their physiology they learned how sugars and starches were made in our own bodies. And lo and behold, the geranium can do a similar thing. "Some plants store up lots of starch, as the potato. Others store quantities of sugar, as the Southern sugar cane and the beet. Wonderful? Well, I guess it is. If we could hear and see all the work these energetic little chlorophyll bodies are doing, we should be amazed. "You will remember that I told you some plants could take the very necessary chemical nitrogen from the air; most of them, however, must get it from the soil. And so again this from the soil solution is worked over into available food. "After all we must not fail to see that water is most important. It floats all the important food elements to the leaves for the work to be done there. The food carbon, of course, is an exception to this rule and I will say again in certain cases nitrogen is, also. "Thus you boys and girls now understand how necessary it is that a soil should be of the right texture to hold water. If it is not, it must be helped to be so. Sand, you will remember, had to be doctored to hold water. Clay needed treatment in order to make it quit its bad habit of baking out. "Here is a rather interesting experiment set up by Josephine and Ethel. Look at the first piece of apparatus--a tumbler partly full of water, a piece of cardboard over the top of the tumbler, and passing down through a hole in the cardboard a piece of plant just stem stripped of leaves, and finally a second tumbler clapped over the first. The second piece of apparatus is exactly like the first, only that the stem, one end of which is in the water, has leaves on the other end. Notice that the upper glass in the second case has moisture on it. The upper tumbler of the other set is perfectly dry. Whence, then, came the moisture? It must, of course, be the leaves which gave it off, since they represent the only difference in the two pieces of apparatus. "I wish we might go on with whole sets of experiments, but for that we have not time. "You understand a little of the mission of root, stem and leaf. The root does a good work in holding a plant in place. It is the foundation material of the plant. There is much, much more to be learned about all these subjects. This little is just to open your eyes to the wonders of the work each plant is performing all the time. "I said I would show you some magic. Well, this magic has to do with plant improvement. It is not much of a trick to raise a plant, but it is a great one to be able to improve that plant. "Let me tell you of a friend of mine whom we will call Rodney, because that is his real name. One day Rodney noticed the gardener doing something with a little flat knife to a pansy. Then he tied a little paper bag over the pansy, of course leaving the whole thing on the plant.