If we can find some quite young seedlings we must manage to secure one or more for examination under our microscope. We must take one up very carefully and wash the earth from its roots--if we pull the earth away our specimen will be ruined. Near the tips of the root branches we shall see something which might be mistaken for mould. Our microscope will show us that they belong to the root; they are, in fact, root hairs. We shall very likely be able to make out that, like the leaf hairs, each root hair is made up of a single cell. The root hairs are interesting because it is through them that water is taken up by the plant from the soil. In many plants a considerable space separates the root from the leaves. When we have learned how to cut sections, we can make slides for our microscope which will show us the whole course along which the water travels, from its point of entry at a root hair to its exit at a leaf pore. Although we have not yet reached that stage, it need not prevent us from seeing some of the minute tubes through which the water passes. Any fleshy stemmed plant will serve our purpose. We must tear it to pieces lengthways with a needle and we shall find many threads--this is not their correct name but it expresses our meaning--running the whole length of the stem. They run, in fact, from the tips of the root to the leaf, and may be seen as leaf veins. If we remove one of these threads and tease it with needles on a slide we shall reduce it to still finer threads. By the way, teasing in the sense we have used it here, means separating the various parts. Let us examine some of these fine threads, we shall see that some of them appear like coiled springs at first glance. A more careful examination will show us long tubes with spiral thickenings. We all know the garden hose-pipe with stout wire coiled round it as a protection; these tubes may clearly be compared with the familiar hose-pipe, where the rubber portion represents the cell wall and the stout wire the thickened parts of the wall. There is, however, this great difference, the wire is outside the hose-pipe, the thickened portion of the plant tube is inside the wall. These tubes are the ducts for water passing from root to leaf. If the agricultural side of botany attracts us we shall not have much difficulty in finding many more objects from the fungus world than are mentioned in our chapter on Agriculture, whilst the study of bacteria may truthfully be termed never ending. Ponds and rivers teem with vegetation suitable for microscopic study. The testing of foods for impurities is largely botanical work. The botanist, of all men, need never allow his microscope to be idle. Our British insectivorous plants are of great interest and they will supply us with some objects for our microscope. We only possess three different kinds of these curious plants in this country, the Bladderworts which live in water and the Sundews and Butterwort, which frequent moist, peaty land.