THE LIFE OF THE SEED.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLII, Issue 139, 13 June 1908, Page 3

THE LIFE OF THE SEED.

(By W. Beach Thomas.) ; Few things look more dead than.the seeds when we trust them to the dead earth. What hint of life is there in the iron shard of a date stone or thm husky dust of grass seed? ' . Even some grown things are dead in. all semblance. Take the lichen on a stone, grey and green as a mineral and brittle as rotten wood. The patch w.ill remain motionless as a stone through all its parts for periods reckoned by some to be as long 1 as IQOO years; but *hen will awake and grow as if it had been planted last autumn. ,' Not less remote from seeming life is the unsown corn grain, which may lie for unknown centuries as dead as the munMny case in which it is housed, but is ready to grow hot and active as a lump of un slacked lime at a touch of moisture. You would say that the renewed activity of each was but due/to a chemical, combination. But what a world apart are the mystery of the commonest growth and the highest marvel of elementary activities. Germs of growth there are of all sorts: seeds proper, of every shape and structure; bulbs which are compressed packets of leaves: root-stocks; fruits, and so on through long lists; but we may speak of them all as seeds in relation to the life that comes out of them when autumn's Sister of the spring shall blow Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth. THE KINSHIP OP SEEDS WITH TREES. It'is stricter science to call them all seeds to-day than it was this time a year^ago. In the course of the study of growth one of the most \original of, our investigators has come to see that the restarting of a root is almost the same thing as the first growth of a seed. The root^of a transplanted tree has to go through the same vitalising process ;»to feel in itself the same striring of spring- desires, and to make the same' endeavours to grow downward and send sap upward. __ Where trees grow at once on replanting, they grow like a blub in witter from their own stores —they extend, that is, rather than develop. The comparison of the root and the seed is natural enough when the nature of the seed is discovered. A bean seed is already a complete plant ; it does not so much change in nature as alter in size, and the only rejected* portion is the hermetic case enclosing it. The two halves into which it easily divides are already leaves, neither more nor less; made fat and fleshy in order that they may supply nourishment to the organism. The hinge of these twin leaves is a structure that contains a stem and a root as perfect in their way as the chestnut flower1 that already, within the sticky rind and flannelly wrappings of the bud is fitted with all the lights that will presently hang a complete candelabra of bloom in full vision. INSTINCT IN ROOTS) The root is already equipped with that quality of instinct that outbids even the bee. You cannot by any trick turn a rootlet from its duty of self-preservation. It needs water, and will make for it always by the directest course. Stop its path with a stone, it will go the nearest way round and continue by the nearest crevice whatever new barriers are in its way towards this bourne. You cannot compel a root, so sensitive is it to gravity, to turn upwards; just as you cannot make the bud take any path that vis not upwards, so repellent of gravity is it. All study of root-growth, indeed of seed-growth, suggests . instinct, and the parallel with the instinct of insects is curiously close. I may work out one comparison, from instances in the two kingdoms, between a grain of corn in one, a solitary bee in the other. The grain has two parts: the small germ which is to be the plant is at one end. All the rest is pure starch, off which the plant is to feed when growth

begins. When the plant is above the soil and able to feed itself from sun j and soil the food store is exhausted, j Now, consider the commonest of the solitary bees. You will notice in late spring little heaps of soil about the garden beds, heaps that some lusty shoot might be raising up. But there will presently emerge from the heap not a white-tipped shaft, but the dusty head of the little red bee. How did. it grow out of the soil? The egg was sown deep; about the egg the mother bee wrapped a store of noneybread, from which at the first change and stir of new life the seedling bee was to feed, in the spring. When the food was taken it started upward, and by the time the air was warm enough to support life it emerged from the top. In autumn, before it withers, it will deposit another fertilised egg in the soil, and- the crop will be perpetuated. Could any life histories be more nearly parallel? HELPED BY MICROBES. No division exists between the animal and vegetable kingdom. To the starting of the seed on its growth there goes the agency of a thing you may call plant or animal, for it is claimed both by botanists and. biologists. Before growth the seed case is probably attacked and the life released by microbes in the soil. By surrounding the seed with a culture of these little organisms—which are. amphibious to two kingdoms— you can make it sprout, as it were, immediately. It does not seem that their agency is necessary to the process, for I have recently seen plants growing finely in perfectly sterilised soil; but they hurry the process, and, with their help, it is claimed that a crop of beans may be raised to completion in a few weeks. These subjects are at this moment deeply concerning many investigators. They have just made the discovery that seeds have, so to speak, inherited constitutions. The grain of certain sunny harvests is found to keep its fertility unimpaired, or little impaired, by the lapse of years. On the other, hand, wheat from a sunless harvest, so it is proved, is stone-dead after two or three years. Every child should watch seeds grow for the sake not so much of science and the first form of original research as for the glimpse of the mystery of renewed life. The spearhead, of the daffodil lifts a corner of the yeil. The acorn or the mustard will show from day to-day the parts of the seed become visible, the white leaves become green leaves, the hinge becomes shaft and root, all parts asserting their epiphany and sucking in the new life. The white corpse-like veins of the seed-leaves give place to the green leaves, whose colour is the symbol of life, is indeed the very life-blood of planti beings. They oome into the light yf day like Shelley's angel— Shadowing its eyes with green and golden wings. The gold of the sun becomes by the universal art of alchemy the green of the leaf, a single, restful, hopeful band of spectrum light, in which, when English, spring is with us, we can find as keen .a hope as the world reposes on the coloured arch of the rainbow. .•,..■. . ".