IX. Plants Have Visitors and Travel Abroad
What a great thing it is for little boys and girls to have play mates. How many more things you learn to know and to do, and how much better a time you have, if you play with others. It is best of all to have some one who has lived in a very different place, and in a very different way from yourself, to play with.
Do you live in the country? And have you some little cousins who live in a city ? Very likely they visit you in the summer. What a treat it is to them. A farm is a strange, delightful land to a city boy. How many wonders he sees, and how eager you are to explain them to him. Then you go to the city to visit, and you see enough new things to talk about for weeks. It is a good thing to go away from home, and to have visitors. Moving about and mixing with people brightens us all wonderfully, and makes us change some of our ways of thinking and living.
It is just the same with plants. Plants that live by themselves, and do everything for themselves, are like hermits in caves. The liver-worts, mosses and ferns are sort of hermit plants. Palms and pines and grasses travel a little. Their pollen grains take journeys on the wind, and visit other plants. They begin to change then. There are thousands of varieties of the higher plants. As plants cannot run about to make new acquaintances, like little boys and girls, they need messenger boys to carry letters. They use the wind, the bees, the butterflies and the birds. By these winged messengers they exchange gifts with their friends and neighbors and relatives in distant fields, just as we exchange gifts at Christmas. Let us see just how they do it.
You have often noticed the grains of yellow powder on little upright threads in the hearts of flowers, haven't you? They are very plain in roses, in the blossoms of fruit trees and buttercups, and many common flowers. Perhaps some one has brushed a buttercup under your chin to see if you like butter. If you do that yellow dust rubs off on your chin. It is so loosely fastened, in some flowers, that you can blow it off. That yellow dust is pollen. Pollen is one of the things the plant needs to make seed. The other thing is an egg.
