Part 8

In a day or two you may dig up one bean from the edge of the pot. Now you will see a small round thing, shaped a little like your lead-pencil point, coming out of the eye of the bean.

Take a needle and gently split the bean open. The upper end of this tiny stem is bent over, and has a little wrinkled knob on it.

In another day you may dig up a second bean. Split it; you will see quite plainly that the wrinkled knob is a pair of leaves, and the round object is a stem.

Wait a day or two more and dig up the third bean. The stem is putting out wee roots. The leaves have come out of the bean and are trying to get to the top of the earth. The two thick halves of your bean are held, by little thread-like stems, to the main stalk of the new plant. The skin that was on the bean is now a small dry husk.

In a few days your fourth bean will be well above ground. You will notice that the two thick halves of the bean you planted are now turning green, and look like thick leaves. At first they lay side by side. The skin was like a little cap over the ends of the two.

Perhaps in that state the bean made you think of a new chick just out of the shell, with a piece of the shell still on its head. Did you ever see that? Soon the bit of husk falls away. Then these two parts of the bean spread from each other. One is on one side the stem, one on the other.

They look like leaves. We call them “the seed-leaves.” You will see that as the plant grows, these shrink up. That is because the young plant is feeding on them. The thick part of the bean is the plant’s first food.

The bean which you put in the middle of the pot has gone through all these changes. Its two little wrinkled leaves become greener and larger. Now they show their deep green color, and are of a heart shape. They have long stems. Between these stems is a little bud, or growing-point. It shoots up and puts out more leaves.

By this time the thick seed-leaves are quite shrunk up and dead. Dig up that fifth bean, the last one on the side of the pot. Can you tell why the seed-leaves are dead? The plant has eaten up all the food in them. And now it has a strong root of fibres, and can take its own food from the soil.

If you look near the roots of trees in the wood or garden, you will, no doubt, find oaks, cherries, maples, other little trees, in all these stages of growth.

Your last bean-plant grows fast. It is tall and slim. It needs a stick to climb on. Notice how the stem winds around the stick. See, the new leaves are pale and smooth. As they grow, they become darker and have hairs on them.

Break off a bit of stem and leaf. There is juice in them. That is sap. It runs all through the plant in little pipes or tubes. It carries in it the mineral food the root-mouths suck from the earth.

By and by you will see a new thing in among the leaves. It is a bud, but not a leaf-bud. It is shorter and thicker than the leaf-buds, and it is twisted. As it grows, its green cover opens, and you see a little white, red, or purple color.

This is the flower-bud. Slowly the colored petals unroll. If you have several flowers on your vine, you can take one to pieces, to look at all the flower parts. The seed-bag at the bottom of the pistil will be so small that you will not notice it.

As the flowers grow older and seem to fade a little, cut off one more to look at. Now you see the seed-pod growing at the bottom of the pistil. The pistil is made of three parts; the seed-bag, the stem or post, and a little cushion at the top.

Now your pretty bean-flower has faded, and fallen away, dead. But what is this where the flower was? A little sharp, green thing is here! Why, it is a tiny bean-pod! Every day it grows larger. You can see the little beans through the skin of the pod.

By and by the pod has its full growth. It is brown and hard and dry. It will crack open easily. It cracks all around into two halves. Here are the beans fastened to the sides of the pod, by little thread-like stems. Just such beans as you planted in the spring!

All the spring and the summer your bean-plant grew. Now it is done growing. The cold autumn has come. The seed is ripe.

But what is the matter with your bean-plant? It is turning hard and brown and dry. It is dead. It will do no good to water it. Its roots drink no more; they are dead. It was made to grow only from spring to fall. From seed to seed, that is its story; that is what it was made for.

Here, folded up in these hard dry beans lie the bean-vines of next year. These new beans will have, if you plant them, such a life-story as this that we have been reading.

LESSON V.

THE GROWTH OF PLANTS.

How do plants grow? That is a very great question, but we will try to find a little part of the answer.

You know when you look at a flower, as a lily, you find in the middle of it some tall, slender parts which you are told are stamens and a pistil. The pistil usually stands right in the centre of the flower. It seems to be the most precious part, and all the other parts take care of it.

I knew a boy who told his sister that “they said at school that plants had little guns.” He thought the word pistil meant something to shoot with! But if there is any shooting done by plants, it is done by the stamens, and not by the pistil.

On the top of the stamen is a little box, to hold the pollen, or flower-dust. You read of that some time ago in the lesson about bees and ants, in your other Nature Readers.

When the pollen is of full size, or ripe, the little box bursts open, and out the pollen flies. The growth of the plant begins here, with the pollen.

A tiny grain of pollen, falling on the top of the pistil, begins to grow. It puts out little threads like roots. These grow down the stem, or post, of the pistil into the seed case. There they find the seed germs, and when the pollen comes to them, the germs begin to grow. They grow very fast.