Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/95

Rh thoroughness with which the pussy-willow prepares for the coming spring, even before the first chill of autumn thrills the summer air, it will be unnecessary to dwell upon this fact. Even in these October days, when the leaves are chasing each other down the roadway, driven by the cruel wind, there are bright promises of another springtime left behind upon the shrubs and trees. The foliage may fall, but its work remains. Their long summer days of toil are not for naught. Within the closely knit covering of the bud sit the germ of a future branch with its leaves defined and its flowers planned. Those who see only evidences of death and decay in the leaf-stripped tree are surface-sighted. A plant is never more itself than when it is fully prepared for a period of repose. It is now most independent and most highly charged with what the physicist would call the energy of position. The plants, therefore, that bloom early in the spring are not idlers through the balance of the year; they ripen their seed, or, in other words, rear up a fine family of children. Each offspring, provided with an outfit for the early struggles of life in the shape of starch, and oil, and protoplasm, is invited to shift for itself. More than this, the mother-plant, if it is the plan that she shall live on, spreads new leaves to the sunshine, and the work of food-making goes on during every day until a store of nourishment is packed away for use in the early growth of the plant the following spring. As a rule, spring flowers are made out of last year's material, and, in this sense, are not as fresh and new as those that come later in the season.

Over fifty pairs of anxious eyes were watching last spring for the first flowers of the year, and it is safe to say that not many days elapsed between the appearance of the first blooms of a species and the time they were discovered. It was none other than the hepatica, or liver-leaf, that first opened its delicate blossoms to the chill air. This was on April 6th, and many days before the snow-banks had silently stolen away. The fact that this little forerunner of warmer and better days has been recently uprooted by botanists and transplanted in another genus seems only to quicken its pulse and make it breathe the air of April more freely. Hepatica acutiloba (DC), of my earlier botanical days, has changed to Anemone acutiloba (Lawson). It by any other binomial botanical title would bloom as early and smell as sweet. Its twin sister has undergone a more violent treatment, and, instead of Hepatica tribola (Chaix), it is settled among the wind-flowers as Anemone hepatica, where the immortal Linnæus had placed it a century ago. The fineness and even brittleness of the thread by which a species is hung is well illustrated by these two hepaticas. Without considering how minute were the characteristics upon which the genus Hepatica was founded by Dillenius, let us see in what the two American species differ. Dr. Gray, in his "School and Fleld-Book," says: "Hepatica triloba (round-lobed hepatica), leaves, with three broad and rounded lobes, appearing later than the flowers and lasting over