Nature Readers - 1888 Author:Julia McNair Wright Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: There is a little pond weed, which, root and all, is not so big as a grain of rice. Other plants are as small as pin heads. Others are so small that you cannot s... more »ee them without a microscope. Plants differ as much in age as in size. Some grow and die in a few hours, or a day. Others live only a year. Some trees are said to live three thousand years. There are plants that have flowers, and plants that never have any flowers. There are plants that grow from the outside in, other plants grow from the inside out.1 If you like plants, and some day study Botany, you will find out about all these things. LESSON III. A LOOK AT A PLANT. Plants are divided into two great classes. One class contains all plants with flowers. The other class contains plants that have no flowers. The plants with flowers are the ones which you like best. They are of the most interest to you. Besides this, they are the easiest to learn about. 1 Gray's " How Plants Grow," pp. il, 42, will here aid the teacher. A piece of m'oss is a flow- erles s plant. What you call a "simple bit of moss," would be harder to learn about than a whole garden full of lilies and roses. The plants with flowers are the most perfect plants. They are also the most beautiful, and the most useful. A perfect plant has six parts for you to notice: 1, the root; 2, the stem ; 3, leaves; 4, blossoms (the blossom is made of several parts); 5, a bag or box for seeds ; 6, seeds. A CHILD OF THE GARDEN. Here are all those parts shown in our picture of a pea-vine. You see our pea-vine has something else. It has little curly things with which to climb. They are its hands for taking hold of objects. They are leaves, buds, or twigs, that have changed. They are now tendrils. They grew slim, and long, and curly, as the plant ...« less