X. How Plants Are Promoted to a Higher Class
A long time ago people thought that flowers were given their beautiful colors and perfumes just to make the world a pleasanter place for people to live in. But now we know that everything lives for itself. It lives to eat and grow and make seeds of its own kind. No doubt, flowers have found out that men and women and little girls and boys are very good friends in helping them grow. They want all the help they can get, so they put on pretty dresses, and use perfumes to coax bees and butterflies to visit them, and they offer cups of honey to their little brothers of the air, so they will come back again.
When we see a flower it seems to have got so far away from the little cell full of protoplasm, or magic jelly, that we cannot understand that they can be made of the same things at all. But the little cell has the same power that the most beautiful flower has. It can take lifeless matter out of the air and water, and make living things out of it. And it can change. Lifted into the sunlight some of its cells turned green. Thrown out on the land, the cells clung and spread into a leaf and sent down rootlets. As the cells could no longer break away and float to start new families, it grew spores and used the wind to scatter them.
Plants changed first by dividing the cells, then by budding new ones, then by uniting different kinds of cells to make spores. In doing these things it learned to break up air and water and put them together in new ways. It learned to divide the work of the plant by making organs—roots, stems, leaves, blossoms, fruits. The lowest plant is a cell, but the highest is only a multitude of cells made of the one material—protoplasm, but changed into many forms and given many kinds of work to do. From using water alone to float in, the plant learned to use earth, air, wind, insects, birds and men, to help it make and scatter its seeds, and to grow better plants.
When you go into the fields and woods in the spring to gather wild flowers, haven't you found some blossoms larger, more perfectly colored and with a sweeter perfume than others? No two violets are just alike. Some are small and pale, others large and blue and fragrant. In the plant world it has always been like that. And the stronger plants always have the best chance to live. They have
