You've noticed, of course, that all the swallows about a barn don't build under the eaves. Some build under the rafters inside the barn. That isn't just a matter of taste; it's family tradition. The eave-builders are descendants of the cliff-swallows, while the birds known to bird students as "barn" swallows build under the rafters.
But they don't take to the fine, new modern barns—all spick and span—the barn-swallows don't. If there's an old gray barn with doors that never shut quite snug, a board off here and there, and several panes in the cob-webbed windows broken out——
"Oh, just the thing!" say Mr. and Mrs. Swallow, and they turn their backs on the new barn and proceed to build their cute little nests of clay among the rafters of that old tumbled-down affair. In their preference for the old gray barns, the swallows are like the artists, the painters that Mr. Dooley told about. He was talking about artists to his friend, Mr. Hennessey:
"I don't mane the kind of painther that paints yer fine new barn," said Mr. Dooley. "I mane the kind of painther that makes a pitcher of yer old barn and wants to charge ye more'n the barn itself is worth."
The reason the artists prefer old barns is that they look better in pictures, but the reason the barn-swallow shows the same taste is that, with windows that have panes in them and doors that shut tight you'd no sooner start to build a nest than, coming back with a pellet of clay, or bringing a feather for the little feather-bed, you'd be liable to find the door shut and you could no more get in until chore time than you could open the time-lock in the First National Bank. And suppose there were babies and you'd just got to get back—you see it wouldn't do at all!
But both the barn-swallows and the old gray barns will be seen only in pictures before long, if things keep on; what with these new barns and the cats always trying to catch the few swallows there are left—when you're swooping low to catch a squash-bug, say—and those hateful sparrows that tear your nest to pieces. And for several years swallows were killed by thousands to make ornaments for women's hats until this shameful business was stopped by law!
On the Pacific Coast, if you're out there even as early as March, you'll see a purplish-bronze swallow, with bronze-green markings. These swallows make a specialty of orchard insects and that's why, perhaps, they build under the eaves of the farmhouse rather than the barn. But, like the rest of the swallow family, they think nothing quite so nice as a bed of feathers to raise babies in, and they know as well as the cliff-swallows and the barn-swallow that a barnyard is a great place for feathers.
And besides, there's a man out there, in one place, that keeps a supply of feathers just to give away when the swallows are nesting. Watch him, over on the hillside. He takes a little bunch of feathers and throws them up into the air from his open hand. A swallow skims by and catches one of these feathers before it touches the ground. But soon the word passes along:
"Here's that nice man with the feathers!"
And, pretty soon, there are a half-dozen in the game. They flit closer and closer to that generous hand, seizing the feathers almost the moment they are in the air. Then one, bolder than the rest, snatches a feather right from the man's thumb and finger. The little rogue!
By the way, do you know who that man is? It's Mr. W. L. Finley, State Ornithologist of Oregon. "Our little brothers of the air," as Olive Thorne Miller calls the birds, are getting to be so much appreciated, not only as the friends of man, but for their beauty and the usefulness of their lives, that both our State and national governments have laws to protect them, and such men as Mr. Finley are employed to look after their interests.
Of course, he doesn't have to furnish feather-beds for the baby swallows—he just does!
If you want to get better acquainted with ostriches you should read Olive Thorne Miller's "African Nine Feet High," in "Little Folks in Feathers and Fur." Carpenter deals with the ostrich in his "How the World is Clothed" and in his "Geographic Reader on Africa"; Johonnott's "Neighbors with Wings and Fins" gives a chapter to "Giants of Desert and Plain," among which you may be sure he includes the ostrich.
Allen, in writing about "Some Strange Nurseries" ("Nature's Work Shop"), tells why it is Papa Ostrich has most to do with the hatching of the eggs when the sun is not on the job.
Lucas, in his "Animals of the Past," speaks of ostriches and crocodiles as the nearest living relatives of—guess what—the dinosaurs! (Yet look at the dinosaur in "The Strange Adventures of a Pebble" and see if you can't make out a good deal of the ostrich and the crocodile in him.)
But, speaking of Papa Ostrich's parental duties, did you know that it's Mr. Puffin, and not Mrs. Puffin, who digs the family burrow? Arabella Buckley's "Morals of Science" tells that and many other interesting things about devoted husbands among the birds, including how Papa Nightingale feeds Mamma Nightingale.
In the "Children's Hour," Volume 7, page 310, you will find an interesting article about the puffins of Iceland.
"The Romance of Animal Arts and Crafts" tells about one of the feathered clay-workers, the nuthatch of Syria, and why he makes his nest look like a rock. These nuthatches love to build so well that they often make nests that they never use; and they even help put up nests for their neighbors!
This book also gives interesting details about the hornbill, and how and why he walls up his mate in her nest in the hollow of a tree. Father Hornbill, of course, gets all the meals for Mother Hornbill, while she's setting. She simply can't get out, and you should see him by the time the babies are old enough to leave the nest. He's worn to a shadow!
Rooks, it seems, do a little digging under certain circumstances. Selous tells about it in his "Bird Life Glimpses." In this book you will find a delightful description of martins building. It almost makes you want to be a martin. It also tells about the work of the sand martins. You will hardly believe how fast they work. The house-martin's nest is more elaborate than the swallow's. This book tells why the house-martins begin work so early in the morning, and why they have to delay their nest-building if the weather is either too wet or too dry.
White, in his famous "Natural History of Selbourne," tells how worried he was because certain swallows just would build facing southeast and southwest.
Birds, besides being workers of the soil, are great sowers of seeds. Darwin tells how he reared eighty seedlings from a single little clod on a bird's foot. What do you suppose he did that for? You just look it up in the index to his "Origin of Species."
Doesn't it seem funny that one of the little farmer birds—a burrower—should go into partnership with a lizard? There is one in New Zealand that does that very thing. He is called the titi. What the titi does for the lizard is to provide him with a home in his burrow, but what do you suppose the lizard does in return to pay for his lodging? Read about it in Ingersoll's "Wit of the Wild," in the chapter on "Animal Partnerships."
Do you know why the phœbe bird so often uses moss in building her nest? And how the phœbes that make green nests keep them green? And how Mrs. P. puts a stone roof on her house? You will find all about it in "Wit of the Wild."
The same chapter, "The Phœbe at Home," tells why the phœbe bird took to building under bridges, and why she builds in a carriage shed instead of a barn, as the barn-swallow does.
"Bird Life," by Chapman, is a guide to the study of our common birds. The beauty about this book is that it has seventy-five full-page plates in the natural colors, with brief descriptions, so that all you have to do is to bring the mind picture of the bird you have seen alongside the picture in the book, and there's the answer! Nobody has written more delightful books on birds than Olive Thorne Miller. "Little Brothers of the Air" is one of them. You couldn't keep your hands off a book with a name like that, could you? Then there is her "Children's Book of Birds," "True Bird Stories," illustrated by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, and "Little Folks in Feathers and Fur," which, as you can see, goes outside the bird family. John Burroughs's "Wake Robin" deals not with robins alone, but with birds and bird habits in general.
But the greatest book about birds—the wonder of the bird and his relations to the whole animal world—is very properly called "The Bird," by C. William Beebe, who is at the head of the bird department of the great New York Zoo. Among other things it tells:
How Nature practised drawing—so to speak—for years before she could finally make a proper bird. (If you have ever tried to draw a bird from memory and realized what a bad job you made out of it, you will sympathize with her.) How they know that the earliest birds Nature made, as well as being very homely, weren't at all smart; not to be mentioned in the same breath with clever Jim Crow, for example. How "a bird's swaddling clothes and his first full-dress are cut from the same piece," the very words of the book. About certain birds that have one set of wings to play in and a new set for flying, like a child wearing jumpers to save his nice clothes! About the world of interesting things you can discover with the bones of a boiled chicken.
And so on for nearly five hundred pages, and as many illustrations; the most striking collection of pictures explaining birds that I ever saw.
THE END OF A BUSY SEASON
"And there's the corn and the pumpkins and the carrots and the turnips and the potatoes in the root cellar and the jelly in the jelly-glasses—we helped make them all."
(OCTOBER)
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of a root acts like the brain of the lower animals.
—Darwin.
This has been a very busy season for Mr. Root and his family. It always is, and you can imagine they're all glad when Fall comes and they can lay by for the Winter.
"There's your apple crop, I helped make that," Mr. Root might say. "And there's the corn and the wheat in the granary, and the rye and the oats and the barley; and the hay in the mow; and the pumpkins and the carrots, and the turnips, and the potatoes in the root cellar; and the jelly in the jelly-glasses, and the jam, and the preserves—we helped make them all.
"And we've been working for you almost since the world began; almost, but not quite—for the earliest plants, the Lichens, for example—didn't have true roots.
"Yes, and—well, I don't want to say anything—Mr. Lichen has been a good neighbor—but he never did amount to much; never could. No plant can amount to much without roots. But with roots and a good start a plant can do almost anything—raise flowers and fruit and nuts, and help grow trees so tall you can hardly see the tops of them. And, it isn't alone what we do for the plants we belong to, but for the soil, for other plants and roots that come after we're dead and gone. For them we even split up rocks, and so start these rocks on their way to becoming soil."
It's a fact. Roots do split rocks. Hundreds of times I've been in the cracks of rocks that were split in that way. I mean right when the splitting was going on. This happened oftenest where trees grew on the stony flanks of mountains. Seeds of the pines, say, dropped in crevices by the wind, sprout in the soil they find there, and then, as these shoots grow up into trees, the enlarged roots, in their search for more soil, thrust themselves deeper and deeper into the original lodging-place, and so split even big rocks. The tap-roots do the heaviest part of this pioneer work. After the older and larger roots have broken up the rock, the smaller roots and fibres, feeling their way about among the stones, enter the smaller openings and by their growth divide the rock again and again.
But it's a lot of hard work for little return, so far as these early settlers are concerned; just a bare living. All these rock fragments, in the course of the years, become soil, but the amount of decay is small in the lifetime of the tree that does the breaking.
A root, as you doubtless know, tapers. This enables it to enter a rock crevice like a wedge. As it pushes its way in farther and farther it is growing bigger and bigger, and it is this steady pressure that breaks the rock. Even the tiny root of a bean grows with a force of several pounds, and the power exerted by the growth of big roots is something tremendous. At Amherst Agricultural College, one time, they harnessed up a squash to see how hard it could push by growing. From a force of sixty pounds, when it was a mere baby, what do you suppose its push amounted to when it had reached full squashhood in October? Nearly 5,000 pounds; over two tons!
HOW A LITTLE ROOT SPLIT A GRANITE BLOCK
The little winged seed from which this pine-tree grew was carried by the wind one day into a tiny crack in that big granite block. As the treelet grew the tap root split the rock, penetrated to the earth below and fed the trunk until it became, as you see, a tree 40 feet high and 18 inches in diameter!
But don't think because roots can and do split rocks, if need be, that they go about looking for such hard work. On the contrary. In travelling through the soil they always choose the easiest route, the softest spots. They use their brains as well as their muscles, and what they do with these brains is almost unbelievable.
Yet the roots are such modest, retiring folks, always hiding, that it was a long time before the wise men—the science people—found out what all they do. It took a lot of science people and the wisest—including the great Darwin—to get the story, and they haven't got it all yet, as you will see. It was Darwin who first thought of having Mr. Root write out his autobiography—or part of it—the story of his travels; for he does travel, not only forward—as everybody knows—but around and around. A regular globe-trotter!
WHY BABY PLANTS BACK INTO THE WORLD
Most plants back into the world out of the seed like that. Why? To protect their tender first leaves. Suppose you were taking some very valuable thing, easily injured—baby brother, say—through a swinging door and you had to use both hands to carry him. You wouldn't open the door by pushing that dear, little tender head of his against it, would you? You'd open it by backing through.
Mr. Darwin was a wonderful hand at that sort of thing—getting nature people to tell their stories. He was an inventor, like Mr. Edison; only, instead of inventing telephones for human beings to talk with, he invented ways of talking for nature people. You saw how he fixed it so that the earthworms could tell what they knew about geometry and botany. Well, in the case of the roots, what did he do one day but take a piece of glass, smoke it all over with lampblack—you'd have thought he was going to look at an eclipse—and then set it so that Mr. Root could use it as a kind of writing-desk. In a hitching, jerky sort of way roots turn round and round as they grow forward. In the ground, to be sure, a root can't move as freely nor as fast as it did out in the open and over this smooth glass, but it does turn, slowly, little by little. The very first change in a growing seed is the putting out of a tiny root, and from the first this root feels its way along, like one trying to find something in a dark room. Thus it searches out the most mellow soil and also any little cracks down which it can pass.
"Here's a fine opening for a live young chap," we can imagine one of these roots saying when it comes to an empty earthworm's burrow or a vacancy left by some other little root that has decayed and gone away. Roots always help themselves, when they can, to ready-made openings, and it is this round-and-round motion that enables them to find these openings.
But even this isn't all. A root not only moves forward and bends down—so that it may always keep under cover and away from the light—but it has a kind of rocking motion, swinging back and forth, like a winding river between its banks, and for a somewhat similar reason.
"It's looking for a soft spot!" says the high school boy, "just as the river does."
Exactly. But not in the sense that this phrase is used in slang. The root has certain work to do, and it does it in the quickest and best way. It can get food more quickly out of mellow soil than out of hard, and so it constantly hunts it up. I mean just that—hunts it up. For it isn't by aimless rocking back and forth that roots just happen upon the mellow places. It's the other way around; it's from a careful feeling along for the mellow places that the rocking motion results.
"But how on earth do the roots do this? What makes them do it?"
That's what any live boy would ask, wouldn't he? So you may be sure that's what the science people asked, and this is the answer:
The roots, like all parts of the plant—like all parts of boys and girls and grown people, for the matter of that—are made up of little cells. Well, these cells, first on one side of the root and then the other, enlarge, and so pump in an extra flow of sap. Now, as we know, the sap contains food for the plant, just as blood contains food for our bodies; and more food means more growth. So the side of the root where the cells first swell out grows fastest and thus pushes the root over on the opposite side. Then the cells on this opposite side swell, and the root is turned in the other direction again. So it goes—right and left, up and down. And when these two motions—the up and down and right and left—are put together, don't you see what you get? The round-and-round motion!
Precisely the same thing happened right now when you turned your finger round and round to imitate the motion of the root. (I saw you!) The muscles that did the work swelled up first on one side and then on the other, just as they do when you bend your elbow, when you walk, when you breathe, when you laugh.
And more than that: You know how tired you get if you keep using one set of muscles all the time—in sawing fire-wood, for example. Yet you can play ball by the hour and never think of being tired until it's all over; because, for one thing, you are constantly bringing new muscles into action as you go to bat, as you strike, as you run bases. It's the same way with the roots, it seems. For the theory is that after the cells on one side have swelled, they rest; then the cells on the other side get to work.
"But what starts the movement?" you may say. "The idea of moving my arms and legs starts in my brain."
Just so again. The root has a brain, too, or what answers for a brain. And the root's brain, is in its head; at least in the vicinity of its nose—that is to say, its tip. It's the tip that first finds out which side of the road is best, and passes the word back to the part of the root just behind it to bend this way or that. It's also the tip that feels the pull of gravity and knows that it's the business of roots to keep under cover. And Mr. Root just will have it that way! You can't change his mind. Mr. Darwin tried it and he couldn't; although he finally changed human people's minds a lot.
WHERE MR. ROOT
WEARS HIS CAP
A root wears its cap right where you do—over its brain department; that is to say, the tip. It is called the "root cap" and protects the tip from injury.
This is how he tried it on a root. He took a bean with a little root that had just started out into the world. He cut off the tip and then set the bean so that the root stuck straight up. It continued to grow that way for some little time. Finally, however, a new tip had formed. Then there was a general waking up, as if the tip said to the rest of the root:
"Here, here, this will never do! Where are you going? You must bend down!"
Anyhow that's what the root proceeded to do. One side seemed to stop growing, almost, while the other side grew rapidly and so the bending was done.
"Did you ever! But how does the tip send back word?"
"Don't ask me!" says the science man; say all the science men, even to this day. "We don't know yet just how it's done. But we're studying these things all the time, and we'll know more about it by and by. Meanwhile, perhaps you'll tell us why you say 'ouch' and pull your finger away when you touch something hot."
"Oh," you reply, "I say 'ouch' because it hurts; and teacher and the Physiology say my arm pulls my hand away because my head tells it to."
"Yes, but how does the head make the arm do the pulling? What's the connection?" says the science man.
Well, I guess we'll have to tell him we don't know, won't we?
But all the root's brains aren't in the tip, any more than all our brains are in our heads. Scattered through our bodies, you know, are little brains, the ganglia, that control different parts of the body. So it is with roots. For instance, a root at a short distance from the tip, is sensitive to the touch of hard objects in such a way that it bends toward them instead of turning away, as the tip does. The result is that when a root comes to a pebble, say, under ground, the sides of the root press close up to the sides of the pebble—turn around corners sharply, by the shortest route—and so get over the obstruction as soon as possible and resume their course in the soil.
BUT THEY COULDN'T CHANGE ITS MIND
Some sprouting seedlings were attached to a disk like that, and when the roots started to grow down, the disk was turned to make them point upwards. But, no Sir! The roots just wouldn't grow upward. They turned downward. Every time!
And different parts of a plant's root system respond in different ways to the pull of gravity, and some don't respond at all. The tap-root, for example, which always grows down, has roots growing out from it horizontally. They just won't grow any other way, and yet this is also supposed to be due to the influence of gravity. Then, from these horizontal roots, grow out a third set, and they don't seem to pay any attention whatever to gravity. They grow out in all directions—every which way—so that if there is a bit to eat anywhere in the neighborhood they are reasonably sure to find it. You see it works out all right.
When a plant first begins to peep into the world out of that wonder box we call the seed, it's the root, as we know, that does the peeping; it comes first. And its first business is to get a firm hold in the soil. So a lot of fine hairlike fibres grow right and left and all around and take a firm grip. There is an acid in the root that dissolves whatever the root touches that has any food in it—including pebbles and old bones—and so makes a kind of sticky stuff that hardens. In this way these fibrous roots not only get good meals for themselves and the rest of the plant, but they hold the plant firmly in the soil, against the strain of the winds. They also give the tap-root something to brace its back against, as it were, while it pushes down for water, for the moisture in the damper portion of the soil beneath.
As you may have noticed, a seed merely lying loose on the ground is lifted up by its first little root in its effort to poke its nose into the soil. But Nature makes provisions for covering seeds up. They are covered by the castings of the earthworms, the dirt thrown out by burrowing animals and scratching birds. Some seeds fall into cracks where the ground is very dry and others are washed into them by the rains; while these as well as seeds lying on the surface are covered by the washings of the rain. Then come the roots that grip the soil.
Always growing just back of the tip, are thousands of root-hairs, as fine as down. These get food from the soil. They soon disappear from the older parts of the root, so that it stops gathering food itself and puts in all its time passing along to the stem and leaves the food gathered by the finer and younger roots. This is why plants are so apt to wilt if you aren't careful when transplanting them; the root-hairs get broken off. For the same reason, corn, after it grows tall, is not ploughed deeply. The fine roots reach out between the rows and the ploughshare would cut them off.
All these things and more the roots do in their daily work—in the ordinary course of business. And it's wonderful enough. Don't you think so? But there are even stranger things to tell; things that would almost make us believe roots have what in human beings we call "presence of mind." That is to say, the faculty of thinking just what to do when something happens that one isn't looking for; when the house takes fire, for example, or the baby upsets the ink.
Take the case of tree roots crossing a country road for a drink of water. They do it just as you or I would, I'll be bound. Just suppose you and I were roots of a big tree that wanted to reach the moist bank of a stream, and there was a hard road-bed between. We can't go over the top, and the road-bed is so hard we can't go straight through on our natural level so we'll just stoop down and go under, won't we? That's exactly what the roots do. They dip down until they get under the hard-packed soil, and then up they come again on the other side and into the moist bank they started for.
The roots of each kind of plant or tree have their natural level; that's one reason, as we know, why so many different kinds of plants—grass, trees, bushes, and things—get on so well together in the fields and woods. The tree roots that we have just seen crossing the road only went down below their natural level because they had to, as if the tip said:
"This soil is too hard. We can never get through. Bend down! Bend down!"
So the roots bent down until they came to softer soil, then forward, but always working up toward their natural level, and so it was at their natural level they came out on the other side.
But here's an example of "presence of mind," that nobody has accounted for. A good-sized root, working along through the soil, like Little Brother Mole, to earn its board and keep, came right up against the sole of somebody's old shoe that had got buried in the soil. In the sole were a lot of holes where the stitches used to be. The root divided into many parts, and many of these smaller roots found their way through the stitch holes. Then, coming out on the other side, these little roots got together and travelled on, side by side!
HOW THE RAG BABIES TELL THE FORTUNE OF THE SEED CORN
In what is popularly called "the Rag Baby Test" the seed corn is placed on squares marked on cloth with numbers corresponding to the numbered ears. Then they are rolled up in one of those moistened rags until they sprout.
Isn't that a story for you? But there's no accounting for it. As we have seen, the men of science know a little bit about how a root manages to turn round and round and away from the light and so on, but what kind of machinery or process is it that could tell the root if it would split up into little threads it could get through the stitch holes in that old boot? You can't imagine; at least, nobody so far has thought how it was done. But it's all true. We'll find the story and a lot of other things about the ways of roots in one of the books we'll get acquainted with when we come to the "Hide and Seek."
© International Harvester Company
THIS IS THE ANSWER
The seed from Ear No. 12 came out beautifully, didn't it? That from Ear No. 13 looks as if they were superstitious in Corn Land; but of course it was the fault of the seed and not of the number.
Here's another example of the same thing; what we have called "presence of mind," resourcefulness, invention. This example is even more striking, if possible, because, for one thing, it is a case where roots still more completely altered their habits to save a tree struggling for its life on a stony mountain cliff. Maeterlinck tells about it in his picturesque and dramatic style. The subject—the hero, as it were—of this story was a laurel-tree growing on some cliff above a chasm at the bottom of which ran a mountain torrent.
"It was easy to see in its twisted and, so to say, writhing trunk, the whole drama of its hard and tenacious life. The young stem had started from a vertical plane, so that its top, instead of rising toward the sky, bent down over the gulf. It was obliged, therefore, notwithstanding the weight of its branches, stubbornly to bend its disconcerted trunk into the form of an elbow close to the rock, and thus, like a swimmer who throws back his head, by means of an incessant will, to hold the heavy leaves straight up into the sky."
This bent arm, in course of time, struggling with wind and storm, grew so that it swelled out in knots and cords, like muscles upholding a terrific burden. But the strain finally proved too much. The tree began to crack at the elbow and decay set in.
As if the roots, naturally so afraid of light, had heard a frantic call for help and, regardless of everything, had come to the rescue.
To be sure, certain roots—the prop-roots of corn-stalks, for instance, as you have noticed—habitually reach from above ground down into the soil, and serve to brace the tall stem swaying in the winds, but trees usually have no such roots and no such habits. Yet, here a tree seems suddenly to have learned, somehow, that elsewhere in the land of plants this thing is done. But how did it learn it? Did the brownies or the gnomes tell it; or was it some of the spirits of the wind that go everywhere and see everything? It might have been the same wind sprites that carry the seeds of the laurel and the pine so far up the mountain flanks. Or it might have been the dryads, those beautiful creatures of the wood the Greeks knew so much about.
I tell you there are some mighty queer things going on in the plant world, and perhaps Bud was right!
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
And, what is more, real live fairies have been found right down in the world of roots! The science people call them "Bacteria," but what of that? The thing about a fairy that makes it a fairy is that it is always changing something into something else. Isn't that right? Well, that's exactly what is done by the bacteria on the roots of certain kinds of plants—clover roots, for one; and the roots of beans, peas, peanuts, and alfalfa. These plants belong to the legume family, and if you will look up the word Legumes you will find out all about these fairy factories on the roots.
Among other things you'll learn how small these fairies are. Why, 100,000 of the bacteria that live on clover roots, marching single file, wouldn't much more than reach across this typed page.[24] And in their little "villages" on one system of clover roots there are so many that all of them put together would make a city as big as London or New York; if the bacteria were as big as people, I mean.
Of course you have to take a microscope to see them—a very powerful microscope—and even then some kinds of bacteria you can't see until you put colored clothes on them. (Every high school boy who has worked in the "lab" knows how this is done.)
And when you finally see them, a strange thing happens. You've hardly got your eye on a little Mr. Bacteria before he's two!
"What's this! What's this!" you say. "Am I seeing double?"
You look again and he's four! But don't be alarmed, you aren't seeing double; it's just the little Mr. Bacterias multiplying by division. How they multiply by division is one of the interesting things you can learn by looking them up.
But it's a good thing that the bacteria people in the little nitrogen factories on the clover roots can get more farm-hands in this way, for they have a lot to do, and their work is one of the most interesting things that goes on about the place.
The article in the "Country Life Reader" on "The Smallest Plant on the Farm" will tell you how important these nitrogen farmers are.
You would hardly believe how great their work is, they're so quiet about it. Do you know what a human nitrogen factory is like? Well, for one thing, it's the noisiest place in the world. Men, as do the bacteria, capture the nitrogen out of the air, but they do it by keeping up continual thunder and rain storms in big barrels. You will find one of these factories described in an article in St. Nicholas, Volume 45, page 1137.
But what a fuss these human factories make! Why, in growing-time, out in the clover field, where the loudest sound you hear is the drone of the bumblebee among the blossoms, the little bacteria people down among the roots are making nitrogen so much cheaper than the big noisy factories that it only costs the farmer about one-fifth as much as the storm-barrel nitrogen. And yet, of course, it often pays to buy the artificial nitrogen, too.
There are many more striking things about the habits of roots than I have had room to tell about here, which you will find in such books as Elliot's "Romance of Plant Life," Coulter's "Plant Studies," Coulter's "First Book of Botany," Allen's "Story of the Plants," Chase's "Buds, Stems and Roots," Atkinson's "First Studies of Plant Life," Darwin's "Power of Movement in Plants," France's "Germs of Mind in Plants," Gray's "How Plants Behave," Carpenter's "Vegetable Physiology," Detmer's "Plant Physiology," and Parsons's "Plants and Their Children."
THANKSGIVING DINNER OF THE DORMICE
They don't sit at the dinner table like that, to be sure, but along in the Fall and up to nearly the time of our Thanksgiving dinners, the dormice eat unusually heavy meals and put fat on their little bones to help them through the long, cold, and barren months of winter.
(NOVEMBER)
—Burns: "Brigs of Ayr."
—Mary Howitt: "Winter."
When the caveman was still living from hand to mouth; before he had even got as far as his first crooked stick for a plough, and when Mrs. Cave couldn't have canned a bean or a berry to save her life, even if she had had the cans, a certain little farmer already knew how to get root crops in the Fall and clean them and cut them and put them away in his little barn under the ground for Winter use.
Several of these forehanded folk we have already met—the beaver and the chipmunk, among others—but since we are now at the end of the harvest year I thought we might spend this evening—the last but one, I am sorry to say, that we shall be together—in a little chat about these thrifty brothers of the wild, and how some of them are going to spend the long Winter that begins in the Autumn and lasts until Spring.
I was going to begin by saying that one of the most fore-handed of them all has six feet, but as that would be almost as bad as a pun, I decided not to. You would have known, of course, that by people with six feet I meant the insects.
Among the six-legged farmers, you may be sure, there have always been many who took thought for the morrow—the ants, for example. One can believe almost anything of ants. If that sluggard had gone to the ant, as wise King Solomon told him to, and learned all their ways, he would have found, among other things, how one species harvests the seeds of the plant known as the "shepherd's-purse," by twisting off the pods with its hind legs. These members of the ant family store grains of oats, nettle, and other plants. They pick up all the seeds they can find that the Autumn winds have already threshed for them, but they're not the least like that lazy man who wouldn't have the corn that was offered by kind neighbors to keep him from starving, because it wasn't shelled. If they don't find enough seeds on the ground when it comes time to think about the Winter stores they climb up and gather in the seeds themselves. On the shepherd's-purse, for example, the ant climbs up, selects a well-filled pod which is not sufficiently dried to have had its seeds threshed out by the winds, takes the pod in its little jaws and then—watch him—turns round and round on his hind legs until he twists it off! Then with it he carefully moves down the stem, like a baggageman carrying a big trunk from the third apartment; only the baggageman carries the trunk in front of him or on his shoulders, while the ant backs his way down. Sometimes two ants work together, one twisting, the other cutting away the fibres with its teeth. Sometimes they drop the pods to companions waiting below, and these other helpers never run off with it, but carry it to the common granary; for ants always play fair.
And they have granaries, these ant farmers—hundreds of them, made just for that, each about the size of father's watch.
THE INSIDE OF THE GRANARY
Underneath the dome of the ant house you see in the previous picture, are flat chambers like these, connected by galleries, in which the grain is stored. One is prepared not to be surprised at anything about ants, but listen to this: The Agricultural Ants not only gather and store this grain, but they actually plant and cultivate it. They sow it before the wet season in the Fall, keep it weeded, and gather it in June of the following year. Seems incredible, doesn't it? But I'm only telling you what McCook, an ant student, recognized everywhere as a reliable observer, saw these six-footed Texas farmers actually do.
Now here's a thing; you stow away a lot of seeds in a little hill where, of course, there's moisture, and what's going to happen? Those seeds are going to sprout and grow and spoil, and this, of course, destroys their value as food. Then what are you going to do? Of course, a human farmer would put his grains in a dry granary where they couldn't sprout, but you see the ants haven't any granary of that sort; nothing but those little holes in the moist ground. Just what they do to these seeds has not been discovered. They do something that keeps them from either spoiling or sprouting. But, when they get ready for these seeds to grow, they let them grow; not so that they can raise a crop, but for the same reason that the Chinaman lets the barley sprout that he uses in making chop-suey; so that it will be nice and soft to eat. This growing digests the starch in the seeds into sugar. When the sprouts have grown as far as the ants want them to, they gnaw the stalk a little, and cut off the roots with their mandibles. When this sugar-making has gone on long enough the ants bring all the plants out into the sun and let them lie there until they are nice and dry. Then they put them in their barns, and as long as Winter lasts they live on this sweet flour, grinding it in their mouth mills as they go along.
Why, it's like living on cookies, almost! Only the ants have been used to this steady diet of sweets for ages, and it doesn't hurt their little stomachs as it would ours.