“Isn’t it!” said Mary Frances. “I remember now, that I once saw on a plant what I thought was a worm, and when I tried to brush it off, it burst open, letting the seeds scatter about.” “I wonder if that wasn’t this plant?” Bet asked as she held up a dried flower head, out of which a worm seemed to be crawling. “That’s it!” cried Mary Frances. “What is the plant called, please?” “It has a very long name,” Bouncing Bet replied; “too long for you to remember, I fear; but it means a ‘coiled worm,’ and shows how perfectly one plant mother has performed this comical trick.” “I suspect all plant mothers have some trick,” Mary Frances ventured. “That leads me to tell you about one kind of plants we’ve not yet mentioned. They are the— PLANTS WITHOUT FLOWERS If plants have no flowers, you will ask, how can the new baby plants grow? Can there be seed babies without flowers? No, flowerless plants do not bear seeds, but they do have plant babies, otherwise we would not have ferns, mushrooms, and many other important plants. The plant babies of flowerless plants come from spores, not seeds. Did you ever gather Christmas ferns? They are the ones which cheer you so with their beautiful green color in the woods when so many other things are asleep in winter. On the back of the fern leaves, perhaps you have noticed little brown rusty-looking spots. In these spots or spore-cases are the spores. When the spore cases are ripe, they burst open and throw out the spores which look like a fine dust. Each grain of this dust must live in a moist, warm place, and pass through several changes before a baby fern can grow. Mosses grow in a similar way. So, also, do— MUSHROOMS OR TOAD STOOLS Mushrooms are flowerless plants, and they do not grow from seeds, but from spores. The spores fall from the pretty gills on the under side of the umbrella part of the plant. Of course, since they have no green color, you know that mushrooms do not make their own food. They, like most other— FUNGI, live on dead vegetable matter. Mushrooms grow by means of thread-like feeders which they send down into the dead material which they use. It is a good thing that fungi use dead trees and leaves and other dead matter for food; otherwise, these things would keep on piling up! I wish to tell you of one kind of fungus, though, which lives on living material in trees. It is called the— BRACKET FUNGUS Perhaps you have thought the bracket-like shelves you have seen on some tree, pretty. You did not know, then, that some spores of the bracket fungi had fastened into a wound in the bark, and had sent long threads down into the living part of the tree. The poor tree cannot help itself, and after a while it will die of starvation because the bracket fungi have used up all its food material.