Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/515

Rh unlock the castle of the ice king. Then the spirit of growth within each spore begins to assert itself once more, and, bursting the walls, the contents soon produce the parent or summer form of the plant with which we are most familiar. Thus the spores which next season will produce the grape mildew and the red rust of wheat are now in existence, the former within the substance of the fallen grape leaf, the latter within the stubble or about the roots of last season's wheat plants.

If the grape leaves should be carefully gathered and burned, and the stubble destroyed in like manner, not only would the next season's crop of these two parasitic plant pests be wonderfully lessened, but many injurious insects would at the same time be destroyed.

Higher in the scale of plant life we find the flowering annuals bending all their energies during the summer to produce that peculiar form, the "seed," which is only a little plant boxed up to successfully withstand the rigors of winter. The great sunflower, that grows into a giant in a single season and defies the summer sun and storm, falls an easy victim to the frosts of autumn. It, however, prepares the way for many successors in the ripened seeds, each one of which, under favorable conditions, will germinate, grow, reproduce its kind, and thus complete another cycle in the realm of vegetable life. The prospective life and activity of a whole field of next summer's waving corn may be considered as stored up in a few pecks of comparatively lifeless seed corn safely housed in the granary. Within its two protective coats and surrounded by a large store of food, in the form of seed leaf or nucleus, to be used when growth begins again, each little plantlet lives and survives the coldest blasts of King Boreas and his cohorts.

Note, too, the buds and underground stems which will furnish the beginning of next season's growth of our biennial and perennial plants. See how they are protected by heavy overcoats in the form of bud scales. Oftentimes, too, as in the hickory and "balm of Gilead" trees, these scales have a coat of resin or gum on the outside to render them waterproof; and some, as those of the pawpaw, are even fur-lined, or rather fur-covered, with a coating of soft black hairs. Were these protective scales not present, the tender shoots within them, which will furnish the nucleus of next season's foliage, would be seared and withered by the first frost as quickly as though touched with a red-hot iron.

The above are some of the many ways in which our plants, in the course of ages and many changes of environment, have solved the problem of surviving the cold of winter. Moreover, they always prepare for this cold in time, the resting spores and