"
"Take a good, full breath after that long sentence," advised James. "Go
ahead, Helen. I don't know much about leaves except to recognize them
when I see them."
"Do you know what they're for?" demanded Helen, once again.
"I can guess," answered Margaret. "Doesn't the plant breathe and eat
through them?"
"It does exactly that. It takes up food from water and from the soil by
its roots and it gets food and water from the air by its leaves."
"Sort of a slender diet," remarked Roger, who was blessed with a hearty
appetite.
"The leaves give it a lot of food. I was reading in a book on botany the
other day that the elm tree in Cambridge, Massachusetts, under which
Washington reviewed his army during the Revolution was calculated to
have about seven million leaves and that they gave it a surface of about
five acres. That's quite a surface to eat with!"
"Some mouth!" commented Roger.
"If each one of you will pick a leaf you'll have in your hand an
illustration of what I say," suggested Helen.
[Illustration: Lily of the Valley Leaf]
They all provided themselves with leaves, picking them from the plants
and shrubs and trees around them, except Ethel Blue, who already had a
lily of the valley leaf with some flowers pinned to her blouse.
"When a leaf has everything that belongs to it it has a little stalk of
its own that is called a _petiole_; and at the foot of the petiole it
has two tiny leaflets called _stipules_, and it has what we usually
speak of as 'the leaf' which is really the _blade_.
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