The Fairy-Land of Science

And now let us see what we have learnt. We began with a tiny seed, though we did not then know how this seed had been made. We saw the plantlet buried in it, and learnt how it fed at first on prepared food, but soon began to make living matter for itself out of gases taken from the water through the cells to its stomach - the leaves! And how marvellously the sun-waves entering there formed the little green granules, and then helped them to make food and living protoplasm! At this point we might have gone further, and studied how the fibres and all the different vessels of the plant are formed, and a wondrous history it would have been. But it was too long for one hour's lecture, and you must read it for yourselves in books on botany. We had to pass on to the flower, and learn the use of the covering leaves, the gaily coloured crown attracting the insects, the dust-bags holding the pollen, the little ovules each with the germ of a new plantlet, lying hidden in the seed- vessel, waiting for the pollen-grains to grow down to them. Lastly, when the pollen crept in at the tiny opening we learnt that the ovule had now all it wanted to grow into a perfect seed. And so we came back to a primrose seed, the point from which we started; and we have a history of our primrose from its birth to the day when its leaves and flowers wither away and it dies down for the winter.