"The root, rootlets and root hairs all go to make up the root-system of
a plant. This system is a feeding and food storage system; cold storage,
we might call it.

"I have spoken before about how the root hairs absorb food. Food is
soaked up something as a blotter soaks up ink. Underground plant food
must be liquid in nature. This is because plants, like babies, must have
very dilute food. Plants can no more get food out of a dry lump of soil
than a little baby can get its food from a hunk of bread or a thick
slice of corn beef. But let that soil be water-soaked, and have the
proper bacteria at work, and the material is in plant-food form.
Josephine has here an old, old experiment. What was a white pink is now
a red one. It has been in that glass of red ink and a little water. And
lo, up the stem the red fluid climbed until it suffused the white flower
and made it red. Notice as Miriam holds that lump of sugar only just
touching the surface of the water, the water moves up that lump. In this
way water and liquid food rise up the stems of plants. Just so, too,
water rises in the soil from the lower layers up to the feeding place of
the roots, and even up to the surface of the ground.

"As the roots are feeding and storing places, so the stem is a sort of
passage way for the passing back and forth of liquids. Take a stem of a
big plant, like an oak tree, and you see in the wood where storage of
fibre has gone on. But the great work is that of interchange.

"Leaves are very active portions of the plant. They represent a great,
busy manufactory. Manufacturing what? That question I see stamped on
Myron's face so plainly he need not speak it out. Manufacturing real
food out of raw material--that is the work of these plant shops.