XXVII. SUGAR CANE IN QUEENSLAND 279 XXVIII. GATHERING RUBBER IN TEHUANTEPEC 304 XXIX. A LIVING BRIDGE 313 XXX. IN A KENTISH HOP GARDEN 316 XXXI. CINNAMON PEELING IN CEYLON 331 XXXII. FUNGUS IN CATERPILLAR 340 XXXIII. AN ARCTIC ALPINE PLANT 354 XXXIV. LAKE DWELLINGS IN EARLY BRITAIN 359 THE ROMANCE OF PLANT LIFE CHAPTER I THE ACTIVITY OF VEGETABLES Plants which move--Sensitive Plant--A tourist from Neptune--The World's and the British harvest--Working of green leaves--Power of sunshine--Work done by an acre of plants--Coltsfoot, dandelion, pansies, in sunshine and in cold--Woodsorrel and crocus--Foxglove--Leaves and light--Adventures of a carbon atom--The sap--Cabbages and oaks requiring water--Traveller's tree--The water in trees--An oasis in Greece--The associate life of its trees and flowers. When we remember either the general appearance or the way in which a cabbage or a turnip appears to exist, it does not seem possible to call them active. It is difficult to imagine anything less lively than an ordinary vegetable. They seem to us the very model of dullness, stupidity, and slowness; they cannot move even from one field to the next; they are "fast rooted in the soil"; "they languidly adjust their vapid vegetable loves" like Tennyson's Oak. In fact one usually speaks of vegetating when anybody is living a particularly dull, unexciting kind of life in one particular place. And it even seems as if the books, which are supposed to give us the best information about the study of plants, and which are not very attractive little books, quite agree with the ordinary views of the subject. For one finds in them that plants differ from animals in being "incapable of motion." This, of course, just means that an animal, or rather most animals, can walk, swim, or fly about, whilst plants have roots and do not move from one spot to another. But it is not true to say that plants cannot move, for most plants grow, which means that they move, and in some few cases, we find that plants behave very much in the same way as animals do when they are touched or excited in any way. We shall have to speak about tendrils, roots, and insect-catching plants later on. But it is perhaps the Sensitive Plant which shows most distinctly that it can shrink back or shrink together when it is bruised or roughly handled.