By R. TURNER.

THE PLANT COMMUNITY AND ITS VILLAINS.

No paradise could be complete for us without a pervading freshness of green in wood and field. In lazy moods and calm sunshiny weather there are few men who will not condescend to stretch out their limbs under a spreading beech, or at least to envy one who is taking life easily for a time in the shade. We all know what a pleasant faint rustle of leaves there is above, and what a flickering of mellowed sunlight comes over the eyes, and how these steal into the heart with a sense of soft content, till we are apt to become like little children, enjoying without much thought, yielding ourselves up to the delight of the mere living, letting our consciousness float along lazily on the current of being. But if we can in such circumstances nerve ourselves to reflect just a little, we shall—if we possess even a very slight knowledge of the processes of nature—become conscious that there are great silent energies and activities at work around us in every blade of grass, and above us in the cool green foliage. The leaves have myriads of invisible little mouths eagerly drinking in the unseen air, and the minute grains that give the green color to these leaves are all the while laying hold of the infinitesimal percentage of carbonic acid impurity in that air, and, invigorated by the quickening sunlight, are able to tear this gaseous impurity to pieces, to wrench the two elements that form it asunder, making the one into nutriment for themselves, and letting the other go free in its purity into the wide atmosphere. What man—with all his sound and fury, his hammering and clanking—has never achieved, is thus quietly done in summer days by every green leaf in God’s world, and inorganic matter is forced to live. While the sun shines these honest workers are striving with all their might to lay hold of every atom of this gas that fouls the atmosphere for animals, and thus, while finding food for themselves, they are keeping the air sweet and pure for other living things. The necessity is laid on them to maintain themselves by honest work; and it is interesting to reflect how massive are the material results that gather round their task. We are apt to forget that by far the greater part of the solid matter of vegetation—of the giant trees of California as well as of the tiniest grasses and green herbs—is thus gathered atom by atom from the atmosphere. One eats his potato thankfully, usually without bothering himself much as to how it came to be a potato; how the green leaves labored away, seizing the scanty atoms of an invisible gas and making them into starch; how this insoluble starch became a soluble thing, and melting away into the sap flowed through the stem to the tubers, there to form again into little grains and be laid up for future use. The rest of the nourishment of such honest plants is usually derived from the soil. The more stimulating food—within certain limits—that crops, for instance, take up by the roots, the harder do their green parts work in the sunlight, making starch and kindred substances out of what they can snatch from the atmosphere. Hence the value of manures; they are stimulants to increased endeavor. Such honest, hard-working plants form by far the greater bulk of vegetation, and of those that grow on land nearly all are conspicuously green. Sometimes—but rarely—the green is disguised a little by another color associated with it, or some tint that is but skin-deep. Take a leaf of the copper beech, for instance, scratch the surface, and you will find the honest green beneath. Even the despised field-weeds, that come up wherever man digs or plows, and linger lovingly about his agriculture, so be it that they are green, are honest in their way, and only take hold of what earth they can find to root in, that they may participate with their fellows in the blessings to be got and given by keeping the atmosphere pure. Man wants to grow grain, or something of the kind, where they prefer to grow, and so, as they foul his husbandry, he ruthlessly roots them out, or tries at least. It is their misfortune that man does not wish them there; but still, contemned creatures as they are, they have honest ways about them, and every green grain in their being is struggling hard to do something genuinely useful. It is only an earnest striving to hold their own against man and brute, that makes humble nettles clothe themselves with stings full of formic acid and fury, and rude thistles bristle with a sharp nemo me impune lacessit at every prickle point. They are armed for defense, not aggression. It is not of stuff such as this that vegetable villains are made.

Since there is so much honesty, however, in the plant world, rogues, and thieves, and pilferers must abound. Consider the animal kingdom. Where herds of deer roam in the wilds there beasts of prey are on the prowl, or sportsmen stalk with murderous guns in hand. Where herrings and pilchards crowd in shoals clouds of gulls and gannets hover, and porpoises with rapacious maws tumble and roll about. Where earthworms abound there moles with ravenous appetite are furiously driving mines, or birds that have sharp, quick bills keep watch with keen eyes. And so in this honest plant community, preying on it and pilfering from it, live and flourish hosts of vegetable villains; some without a trace of green in their whole being, living by theftuous practices alone; some with just the faintest suspicion of green and the slightest indications of a true nature; others with a good deal of the better color about them, but still only indifferently honest. There is something of marvel and mystery about these plant pilferers—of strange peculiarities in their modes of life, and in their adaptations for plundering and preying, which can hardly fail to interest intelligent minds, even when brought before them in a sketch such as this, which does not profess to take in more than the outermost fringe of a wide field. Without terms and technicalities and a strange jargon of crabbed words that would be dry as dust, and meaningless to most readers, little professing to be thorough can be done; yet, after all, something more generally comprehensive may ooze through in comparatively plain English.

With regard to their pilfering habits, such plants are usually proportioned off into two great groups. They either attach themselves to other beings and absorb their juices, in which case they form a mighty host of plants of prey usually known as parasites; or they seek their nurtriment, and find it, in dead and decaying organisms, and are then known as saprophytes, a somewhat hard word to begin with, for which I can not find a popular equivalent, but which merely signifies plants that grow on decomposing matter. All land plants that are not blessed with a true green color belong to one or other of these groups, and are villains in their various degrees. They make no effort to free the air from the gaseous impurity that haunts it, but, like animals, they keep fouling it instead. With a very few exceptions, all of them subsist on organic matter in some form, and this they usually draw from the plants, living or dead, on which they grow, or from decaying matter in the soil. But many of these vegetable villains run into half-honest vagaries, and succeed in raising themselves slightly above the common ruck. If they can not seize and break up carbonic acid gas, they may do a little toward atmospheric purification of a kind by laying fast hold on such organic particles as are floating in the air or brought to them in falling moisture. Plants such as these are sometimes found growing on barren sand, on hard gravel, on parapets of bridges, on leaden cisterns, on plastered walls, on slag, and in like inhospitable places, where they are compelled to turn mainly to the atmosphere and trickling moisture for food. Some such haunt mines like phosphorescent ghosts, others make themselves at home on places like the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. In a mass two feet in length, similar strange plants were one morning long ago found by a smith on a piece of iron that he had taken, on the previous night, red-hot from his fire, and laid on his water trough. Many similar vagaries they run into that would in the telling sound almost incredible. Indeed, the whole group of the saprophytes is not to be accounted so utterly abandoned as that of the parasites. To these they are certainly nearly related, but there is more of the useful scavenger about them than of the useless thief. No sooner has death overtaken any plant than a host of them set to work to clear away the now useless organism from the world, breaking down herbaceousness into putrescence, timber into touchwood, and all at last into vegetable mould. Their mission is to seize upon decaying matter and endow it with life in a new form; and thus out of rottenness often comes wholesomeness, decay moulding itself into pleasant mushrooms, or into things unfit for human food perhaps, but that may bring the blessings of abundance to many little living creatures. If such as are edible are to be considered villains, then people of delicate palate who smack their lips over some of them have a right to insist that these should be specially classed as dainty little rogues.

Still this useful scavengering habit is nearly allied to the pilfering one. Decay attacks part of a tree, for instance, and saprophytes set to work at the dead branch, but they are apt to extend their operations to the adjoining living tissues, which die, too, and decay, till in the end the tree may be entirely destroyed. The scavenger, we can thus understand, is apt on occasion to relapse into the thief and the out-and-out villain.

To one or other of these two great groups, or occasionally to both, belong, besides a few flowering plants, the whole extensive division of the fungi, and it is to be noted that none of this curious class of plants is ever blessed with leaf-green or starch in any part of its substance. Whether minute even under powerful microscopes or measuring several feet across; whether hard as wood or a mere mass of jelly; whether horny, fleshy, or leathery; whether resisting the action of the elements for years or hardly able to outlive a puff of wind; whether beautiful, commonplace, or ugly; whether sweet-scented or otherwise, in this they agree, that in all of them is wanting that greenness which makes honest work possible, and those little grains of starch that come from honest work done.—Good Words.

I am afraid that a lightsome disposition and a relish for humor are not so common in those whose benevolence takes an active turn as in people of sentiment, who are always ready with their tears and abounding in passionate expressions of sympathy. Working philanthropy is a practical specialty, requiring not a mere impulse, but a talent, with a peculiar sagacity for finding its objects, a tact for selecting its agencies, an organizing and arranging faculty, a steady set of nerves, and a constitution such as Sallust describes in Catiline, patient of cold, of hunger, and of watching. Philanthropists are commonly grave, occasionally grim, and not very rarely morose. Their expansive social force is imprisoned as a working power, to show itself only through its legitimate pistons and cranks. The tighter the boiler, the less it whistles and sings at its work.—Oliver Wendell Holmes.