The true northerner., 1883-03-16
Plants Caught Mapping.

Plants Caught Mapping.
As we come to be more intimate with
plants, and know all about their doings
and see into their daily lives, we con-
tinue to find things which remind us of
animals. Plants, we already know, eat
and drink and breathe and move. Be
sides all these things, they sleep; and
they must get their sleep regularly, or
they lose their health completely.
Nowadays inventors spend their lives
trying to find out useful things things
that will make life easier and pleasanter;
such things as steamboats, and railroad
cars, and telegraphs, and sewing-ma-
chire5, and thousand others of the
same kind. In old times all the inven-
tions were made to compel men to be-
lieve this or that religion by the use of
ingenious tortures There was no end
of different kinds of suffering which
poor miserable people who had their
own ideas on religious subjects had to
suffer Among these was the horrible
torture of keeping people awake night
and day till they died. Such dreadful
things are no longer practiced on peo-
pie in Christian lands; but many and
many poor plant dies and makes no
sign from just this cause.
People can sleep where there is a
light i'll the room; hardly so sweetly
and soundly / think as they can in the
darkness still they can go to sleep in
| the light. But plants cannot Until
the darkness comes they go on working
! and working, no matter how tired they
| lNo
in the harness and die. The work they
do, have already told you, is to sepa-
rate the poisonous carbonic acid gas Of
the air into two useful things-carbon
for themselves, and oxygen to keep
people and animals alive. But they
need rest as much SIS You or | do.
Working night and day is too much Of
strain, and finally their health breaks
down, and they die.
Many plants are not contented merely
to stop working. That does not give
them all the rest they need. The leaves
want to lie down or to hug close to
each other, in order to sleep comfort
ably, and rise refreshed. If you notice
carefully spray of locust leaves, for
instance, by daylight, you WI see it
looking something like this: The
leaves are all spread out to catch the
light and the breezes. The thousand
little mouths are open, breathing in the
air. But in the evening, after it has
grown dark, they lay hugged up to
keep warm, their little mouths pressed
close against each other.
1t may seem as wonderful to you as
it did to me when l first learned it, that
all your lives the plants and trees
around you had been going to sleep and
cuddling up in this way, and you had
never noticed it or known it. When
you think of it, it is not really so
strange; for most of the time that the
leaves are asleep you are asleep too,
and any light which under ordinary
circumstances would show them to you
would keep them from going to sleep.
In order to see these sleeping leaves
you would have to take lantern and
go out after it was dark, and examine
sprays which you had particularly ex-
amined by day, TO see just the differ
ence.
The young leaves, like young babies,
sleep most, and cuddle up closer than
the older ones do. / examined great
many plants, and found no very COM
mon plant more interesting than the
locust tree. Some wistaria leaves, es-
pecially the young Shoots not only
close mp but turn over on their stems to
get their rest.
The most remarkable plant of all that
| examined was mimosa-tree, or sensi-
tive plant, as it is often called. This
tree, however, grows full thirty feet
high. You can sit and watch the
branches against the evening sky, and
"a the twilight falls the whole tree
seems to be thinning out until it looks
as if the season had gone backward,
and we were looking at the tree in its
early spring dress of delicate sprays.
1t puts one in mind of Keats beautiful
lines, when speaking of q lovely girl
going to sleep:
As IL a rose should shut and be a bud again.
It sometimes happens that plants
which usually close their leaves when
they sleep are very heavily shaded dur
ing the day. When this is the case they
do not seem to be much affected by the
darkness of the night, and do not change
the position of their leaves. It would
seem as if they had been half asleep all
day, and so had spoiled their nights
rest. Darwin tells us of plant which
he says he watched carefully, and for
two nights after having been violently
shaken 10y the wind it did not cuddle
down to sleep. 1t was probably too
much excited to rest properly.
This movement of sleep is so much
affected by the presence or absence of
water, which you remember is the
cause of all vegetable movement, that
if the ground in which the plant grows
is allowed to get very dry, or the air
becomes extremely parched around it.,
it makes no sleep movement at night.