VIII. Why Plants are Like Squirrels
Did you ever see a squirrel gathering acorns and nuts in the autumn? All summer long squirrels eat their food as they find it, bring up their babies, grow fat themselves and play a great deal. But when the first frost sends the nuts rattling to the ground, they know winter is coming. So they lay away a good store of food, in some safe place, to last them through "hard times." Wise little brother of the tree tops! How busy he is, and how hard he works!
Plants are just like squirrels. They eat and grow all summer, feed their flower babies until they are ripe seeds, then they store food to last them until the Spring. It is not so easy to catch plants at work, as it is to catch squirrels, but if you have very sharp eyes and minds you can do it. All plants above the fungi, earn their own living. In all green plants the roots get food from the earth, and the leaves get food from the air. The two kinds of food come together in the leaves, and the sun mixes and changes them into plant cells.
In the story about water you learned that water never runs up hill. Then how does water get from far down in the ground to the top of a tree? It doesn't run up; it is pumped up. Get a basin of water. Hold your handkerchief so just the hem on one side of it is in the water. That becomes wet at once. Hold it there. See the water climb, thread by thread! In a little while the handkerchief is wet to the top. You know a wet piece of cloth dries rapidly in the sun. As the water in the handkerchief passes into the air as vapor, more water is drawn from the basin. After awhile it is all soaked up. The basin is empty, and soon afterwards the handkerchief is dry.
This drawing of water up by threads, is called capillary attraction. A lump of sugar has it. Hold a lump of sugar with one tiny corner of it just touching the top of a cup of coffee. Soon the whole lump is brown and wet. A plant is like a big handkerchief full of threads that run from the root hairs to the leaves. The sun draws the water, in vapor, from the leaves, and more water is pulled up just as long as the roots can find any in the earth. Those little wood-fibers that you
