THE QUARTER.

SPRING blesses the plants with genial air and showers,
that are not often deficient or excessive. In almost all
countries of our temperate regions, however the rain
may be otherwise distributed throughout the year, one-
fifth part of the yearly fall is pretty constantly allowed
to spring. During the winter-time our trees and herbs
have rested. In the hot countries within the tropics,
growth of plants is brought to a pause during the dry,
hot season, and begins again when the rains come. Our
plants wait for the warmth and the light rains that
make and end of frost. Not only do nearly all plants
hybernate after a way of their own, but when in the most
active time of life they have their times of sleeping and
of waking. Most of them go to sleep of nights. The
daisies shut their eyes every evening, and when the rays
of the morning slant over earth again, the winking marybuds
begin to ope their golden eyes. The follow the common
rule, though there are some plants to be reckoned
as "the bats and owls of the vegetable kingdom." Thus
the night-flowering Cereus begins to open, in the evening,
its sweet and splendid blossom, is full-blown at midnight,
and at dawn closes, never again to be seen.

Upon the presence or absence of the SUNLIGHT their
changes depend. Sunbeams, indeed, are to plants the
gold, without which either they die or drag out a
pale life, looking as destitute and sickly as the most
forlorn of human paupers. The golden sunbeams are
the power by which they work wonders. For example,
one essential to the life of plants is that they should
decompose within their substance, and resolve into its
subtle elements the water sucked up through their
roots. This they do by a vital electricity which the
sunlight engenders. But the electricity required for the
decomposition into its first principles of but a single
drop of water, is as much as by its working deafens us
and dazzles us during an ordinary thunderstorm. Very
quietly the plants work, with this power active in them
all day long. Under the influence of sunlight, chemical
change is going on all day through, at the surface of
every leaf in the garden or the field, and, by that
change, solid matter is formed in the substance of the
plants, great oaks and palms are built up to the sky.
While it goes on in day-time, an elemental gas, called,
by its first discoverer, oxygen or producer of sharpness,
is poured out of plants into the air: without that gas
no animals can live. They breathe it, and it is used in
their bodies for the producing of changes which lead to
the pouring back from the lungs of every draught of air
that has been taken, charged with a gas—known as
carbonic acid gas—which is the very thing that plants
are asking for all day, and all day getting, and for which it
is ordained that they shall exchange the oxygen that
animals require. In a subtle, unseen operation, therefore,
proper to all life upon this earth, the world of plants is
necessary to the world of animals, the world of animals is
necessary to the world of plants. This is true, even of
animals and plants living in the sea. Were there no
vegetation in the sea, there could be few or no fishes. The
keeper of a mimic lake or ocean in a glass-case,
commonly known now as an Aquarium, learns with how
much delicate care he must watch over the establishment
of a balance between the water-plants and animals
within his little pool. If there be no plants, animals
will hardly live; the two sorts of life are necessary to
each other, and proportion must be kept between them.

Over the dry land great systems of winds blow that
help the natural and peculiar tendency which every gas
has to diffuse itselt. At night, the chemical action of
the sun being withdrawn, plants do not give out oxygen,
the producer of sharpness, but absorb it, while some of
the carbonic acid is returned. Thus, in a certain plant
growing where the power of the sun is put forth
vigorously, the leaves combine with oxygen during the
night, and are as sour as sorrel in the morning; as the
sun rises, they begin to pour out oxygen, and by noon
they become tasteless; the giving out of oxygen and
taking in of carbon still goes on, and towards evening
the leaves have beome bitter.

Fine earthy MOULD is produced by the decay of plants.
The fallen leaves of autumn, when they rot, combine
some of their substance with oxygen, and turn it into
carbonic acid gas; therefore that gas, essential food of
plants, exists abundantly in every good soil. It needs
the touch of air on the decayed matter to produce this
gas, which shall be to the young seed as necessary food
as milk to babes. Men, when they turn the earth up
with the plough, make it more fertile by enabling air
to combine with the earth more freely. The worm, whom
we esteem so little, is a ploughman of divine appointment.
He eats earth, and extracting from it something
for his own subsistence, passes the rest through his
body, whence it comes, as we see it in fine heaps at the
mouth of the worm's burrow, the finest mould. Thus,
far more perfectly than man can do it, is the soil turned
up, loosened, delicately sifted for us, by the friend of
whom we sometimes speak as if he were the most
worthless of God's creatures. It is said that there is not an
atom of the finer vegetable mould that has not passed
through the intestines of a worm.

THE SEED of a plant while the earth is dry and cold,
and so bound up as to exclude much contact of the air,
remains inactive. The moisture in the earth expanded
when it froze, and in so doing minutely separated all
the particles of earth; thus, when the thaw followed,
the soil was loosened, and the next frost further separates
the particles by the expansion of the water in the
ground which takes place in the act of freezing. When,
therefore, the worm is not at work for us in loosening
the soil, and so preparing it for the due nurture of the
seed, the north wind is our friend and helper. The
warm spring rains soak readily into the soil that has
been thus prepared for their reception by the winter
frost. Moisture, warmth, and air reach to the seed and
the soil in which it lies. The seed imbibes some of the
moisture, and its tissues being softened, stretch as the germ
swells. The water so absorbed is decomposed—already
the chemical action has begun; the oxygen of the water
makes carbonic acid with the carbon in the seed, and
the starch of the seed is converted into sugar for the
nourishment of the young plant, which next appears.
The coat of the seed bursts, and the delicate point of
the rootlet—the part that had lain naturally nearest to
the surface—comes into direct contact with the earth.
The rootlet lay nearest the surface, and appeared the
first, because its part is to begin at once its work of
sucking nourishment up out of the soil into the germs
of the first leaves and of the future stem, which
presently are by such good help made strong enough
to break their way into open air. Very soon after
they have done that, they begin to draw from the
air strength and life, and to repay the kindness of the
little root by sending down into it woody fibres, which
are made, as by the Divine wisdom even all the mighty
trunks of oak and cedar have been made, out of the air
we breathe, in part out of the very breath that we
exhale. We draw breath in, it is the life of man; we
give breath out, it is the life—nay, the very subsance—
of the trees and flowers. There was a maiden out of
whose mouth when she spoke fell diamonds and pearls,
—that was a fable. But it would not be altogether fable
to say, even of the ugliest hag living, that out her mouth
when she speaks there issue violets and roses.