Page 100 - My FlipBook

Indeed, they have dissolved a portion of the hard marble in
their effort to obtain nutrition for the plant. Now, this plant
is composed mostly of hydrocarbon. The carbon is taken
from the air. These leaves spread to the air, they become
the lungs of the plant through which its breathing is done.
They take in the carbonic acid from the atmosphere, they
take in the oxygen ; they throw 'out the oxygen again and re-
tain the carbonic acid. Animals throw out the carbonic acid
and retain the oxygen. With the plants it is the reverse. But
the plant also requires more or less of inorganic salts, and
it is in the effort to obtain these inorganic salts that these lit-
tle root pads have destroyed the polish on the marble
wherever they pass along in order to dissolve out that por-
tion of inorganic material required for the building of their
tissues. Then we may recover that inorganic material again,
if we will burn the plant, in the ash we will again find that
;
inorganic material which it has taken out from the marble in
its effort to obtain material for the nutrition of the plant.
Now, this is another form of stomach, as we would term it
in the animal ; it is on the outside. Now, did you ever think
of it? As a matter of fact, the stomach of animals is on the
outside of the animal, although inclosed within the body.
The food doesn't really get into the man until it is passed
through the walls of the stomach. It is formed by a folding
of the membrane inclosing this cavity in which digestion is
performed. The man wants to take his food in his fingers,
put it in his mouth and go on about his business ; the animal
takes it in his mouth and goes on about his business, and the
digestive processes are carried on while other things of in-
terest are being looked after. But the plant, it is stationary,
and its stomach is on the outside.
This is the difference, then, between the position of the
organs in the plant and in the animal. In the amoeba we
found the stomach made for the particular occasion by a
folding of the protoplasm, of which that little cell is formed,
about its food, taking it within itself and making a stomach
for the particular piece of food. But in the plants we find
these formed upon the outside in the growing plant. In the
seed, however, a special provision informed within the store
of starch that is laid up, but outside of the germ.

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