Part 40

How Do Plants Reproduce Life?

In the spring we put seeds into the ground and later on plants grow up where the seeds were planted, and later the flowers come. The seeds contain the baby plants, which come to life, and after bursting the covering of the seed, unfold and grow up into plants if placed in the ground, where they can obtain the proper amount of warmth and moisture to give them a start.

Why Do Plants Have Seeds?

To get at this subject in the best manner we must study first how plants produce seeds and what happens. The power in a plant to make another plant like it grow comes from the flower. Ordinarily we think of the flowers as beautiful to look at and delightful to smell, but the flowers do not grow for the mere purpose of being beautiful, but are for a more useful purpose--to develop a seed which, when planted, will produce another plant. The machinery for producing a perfect seed is in the flower or blossom. Every flower has a definite plan of construction. The leaves and colors vary, but the plan for a perfect flower is always there. The petals which are generally colored are called the crown. When you pluck off the petals you see a number of green leaves at the bottom where the petals were attached. These form what is called the calyx, and help to hold the petals in place. Inside the flower are little stems which grow to the petals. These are called stamens. Every one of these little stems is hollow, and if you split one open you will discover a fine powder. This powder is called pollen, and is the “father” nature of the plant. In the calyx, the part we had left after we plucked off the petals, is the “mother” nature of the plant. The main part of the mother nature is the stem of the flower called the ovary, and this is where the seeds grow. These seeds in the ovary, however, will not become perfect seeds unless some of the pollen from the “father” nature of the plant touches them and fertilizes them.

At the proper age of the flower some of this pollen powder passes into the ovary and fertilizes the seeds and makes them good seeds. This is only one kind of flower, however. In this kind the father and mother natures are in the same flower. In other kinds of plants the father and mother natures are found on different parts of the same plant.

Why Does an Ear of Corn Have Silk?

The corn plant is one of this kind. You know what it looks like--a tall plant, generally six or seven feet high. The ears of corn grow out of the side of the corn stalk. The ear is covered with husks and out of the end of the ear hangs a bunch of brown silk threads which we term corn silk. Up at the top of the plant you will see the tassel, but you may not have known that this is the flower of the corn plant. The tassel or flower in this case contains the “father nature” of the corn plant, and the ear of corn contains the “mother nature.” The husks on the outside of the ear of corn protect the grains of corn on the ear inside and keep them tender. The ear of corn is really the ovary of the corn plant, because that is where the seeds grow. You will guess, of course, that the grains of corn on the ear are but seeds of the plant. Were you to examine one of these ears of corn on the plant when it had just started to form you would find no kernels on the cob, but only little marks which indicated where the grains of corn are expected to grow, but if you want to know, then, how many grains of corn were expected to grow on the ear, you could easily tell by counting the little silk threads which you see on the cob and which stick out over the end. There will be a thread of silk for each grain of corn that is expected to grow.

Every grain of corn must receive some of the pollen powder from the tassel or father nature at the top of the corn plant or it will not develop into a nice large, juicy kernel.

How Does the Pollen Touch the Grain of Corn?

Before the kernels of corn grow the tassel is in bloom. The wind blows and shakes the pollen powder off of the tassel and the powder falls on the ends of the silk which stick out of the little ear of corn to be. Each thread of silk then carries a little of the powder down to the spot on the ear where it is attached and thus the grain of corn receives the fertilizing necessary to develop it into a ripe seed. If you leave the ear of corn alone the kernel will eventually become yellow and hard and can then be planted and will produce other corn plants. Man, however, finds the ear of corn a delightful food, if taken at a time when the seeds are fully grown but not yet ripened into perfect seeds. At this stage the grains of corn would not grow up again if planted, because they have not yet become perfect seeds.

Do Father and Mother Plants Always Live Together?

We come now to the kinds of plants on which the “father” and “mother” natures are on different plants of the same kind. At times they will grow side by side, at other times they will be in the same field, but very often they grow at quite a distance from each other. In some instances the nearest father tree will be even miles away from the mother tree of the same kind. But in any event the pollen from the father nature must reach the mother nature of the plant or tree before a perfect seed can be produced. In cases of this kind the father nature will be on one tree or plant and the ovary or mother nature on another. The wind helps out nature in some of these cases by blowing the pollen of the father plant to the ovary of the mother plant. In many other instances the bees and insects help.

Why Do Flowers Have Smells?

Where the bees do this it is because the bee has been visiting the flowers in his search for honey. They do not fly from flower to flower for the purpose of uniting the mother and father natures of plants, but they help the flowers incidentally while getting the honey for which they are searching. In gathering his honey the busy bee will go all over the father flower and get his legs all covered with pollen powder. Sooner or later he comes to a mother flower of the same kind of plant or tree from which he has father pollen on his legs, and, still bent on gathering honey, he incidentally rubs the pollen powder on to the ovary of the mother flower and the fertilization takes place. The wonderful thing about this is that the father pollen of one kind of a plant will not fertilize the mother nature of another kind of plant. To illustrate this, if a bee carrying pollen on his legs from a walnut blossom visits the mother blossom of a hickory tree the pollen of the walnut would not affect the hickory blossom, but would still have the proper effect on the first walnut mother blossom he visited.

This is how life in general is reproduced among the plants and trees. Life in the vegetable kingdom has no sense of feeling or any of the other senses, but this kind of life is still true to its own nature and is a wise thing in the plan of creation, because, since all seed will produce only plants like those from which the seed came, man can control the growth of the vegetables and fruits he needs as food. He knows when he plants corn that he will get corn in return, because perfect seed never makes a mistake. It would mix things up terribly for man if this were not so, because man might then plant one thing and find another thing growing. It would be a sad thing to plant wheat and find thistles growing.

In order that seeds may grow they must be planted under conditions that suit the kind of vegetable life in the seed. Man has to study and learn what these conditions are.

If a seed is planted too deeply the sun may not have a chance to warm the ground to that depth, and if it is planted too near the surface it may become too warm and be killed by the sun. When planted under the proper conditions the seed soon begins to grow. It grows upward toward the sun to get light and air, and it sends roots down into the ground to get food and moisture.

The life in the vegetable kingdom is soon able to take care of itself.

How Are Fishes Born?

The next step in the study of the reproduction of life brings us to the animal kingdom. The first thing we discover in this section is that in the animal kingdom father and mother natures are almost always separated. In plants and trees these parent natures are sometimes in the same flower, often separated, but on the same plant, and in other instances on different plants miles apart. What we must remember, then, is that in the case of plants it is given more or less to the chance of wind or other circumstances to bring the parent natures together.

In the animal kingdom there are a few cases where the mother and father natures are found in the same living object, as in the oyster and clam families, one of the lowest forms of animal life. These have but one of the five senses--that of feeling. This class of animals--the cold-blooded animals--includes the fishes, and in most members of this class the father and mother natures are separated and in different bodies. Step by step from now on we enter higher forms of animal life, and through each step we find a greater difference between the father and mother natures, and in the animal kingdom we speak of the father and mother natures as “male and female.” In the animal kingdom, too, what we have previously called the seed is known as the egg. Seeds and eggs are the same so far as their usefulness is concerned, but we say eggs in the animal kingdom to distinguish from seeds in the vegetable kingdom.

Fish have eggs, then, and it is from the eggs that little fish are born into the world and grow to be of eatable size. You recognize the eggs of the fish in the “roe,” which is eaten as food. Not all fish eggs are used as food, however.

In the fish world the eggs are developed in the body of the female fish. Each little round speck in a “shad roe” is one egg, and there are many thousands in a single “roe.” Each egg will produce a little fish, under favorable conditions. These eggs develop in the body of the female fish in winter. In the spring, which is the time in which most living things are born, and, therefore, the time for hatching out fish eggs, all of the fish swim from the deep water where they live in winter to the places where the water is shallow and warm, and in these shallow waters the female fish expels the eggs from her body where the sun can get at them and hatch them by warming them. After the female fish has thus laid the eggs, the male fish swims over the eggs as they lay in the water, and expels from his body over them a fluid which is white in appearance and which fertilizes the fish eggs. If any of this fluid fails to reach some of the eggs it is not possible for the sun to bring them to life.

When the eggs are laid and fertilized the mother and father fishes swim away and they never see their children or recognize them as such, even if they meet them later in life. The parent fish do not act like other fathers and mothers, and they do not need to, because as soon as a baby fish is born he is able to find his own food and needs no help from father or mother to teach him how to find it or enable him to grow into a real fish.

Of course, many of the tiny fish are eaten by other fish and not all the eggs which the mother fishes lay hatch into live fish, because, if they did, the waters would be so crowded with fish that there would not be any room for the water. A single female fish will lay millions of eggs in a year, and if each egg developed into a fish there would be far too many.

This order of animals, which includes turtles, frogs, etc., is the cold-blooded class of animal life. They have only part of the five senses. They all can feel and some of the fishes can see and hear, but a great many of them, particularly those kinds which live on the bottom of the ocean, cannot either see or hear, and some members of the fish family cannot even swim.

The thing to remember about fishes in connection with the reproduction of life is that the mother fish must select a place which is favorable to deposit the eggs, but after that her responsibility ceases. The father merely fertilizes the eggs, and then his responsibility ceases. The little fish look out for themselves as soon as they are born and never know what it is to have a father or mother to look after them.

When we study the next higher form of animal life we find that the young ones have to be looked after, and that this becomes more necessary as we ascend the scale of animal life until we reach man, the most intelligent of all animals and yet the most helpless of all at birth.