so; though, when it
cannot get water from the air, it will gladly drink by its roots. But the
things it cannot receive from the air at all are certain earthy salts,
essential to it (as iron is essential in our own blood), and of which when
it has quite exhausted the earth, no more such plants can grow in that
ground. On this subject you will find enough in any modern treatise on
agriculture; all that I want you to note here is that this feeding function
of the root is of a very delicate and discriminating kind, needing much
searching and mining among the dust, to find what it wants. If it only
wanted water, it could get most of that by spreading in mere soft senseless
limbs, like sponge, as far, and as far down, as it could--but to get the
_salt_ out of the earth it has to _sift_ all the earth, and taste and touch
every grain of it that it can, with fine fibres. And therefore a root is
not at all a merely passive sponge or absorbing thing, but an infinitely
subtle tongue, or tasting and eating thing. That is why it is always so
fibrous and divided and entangled in the clinging earth.

9. "Always fibrous and divided"? But many roots are quite hard and solid!

No; the active part of the root is always, I believe, a fibre. But there is
often a provident and passive part--a savings bank of root--in which
nourishment is laid up for the plant, and which, though it may be
underground, is no {32} more to be considered its real root than the kernel
of a seed is. When you sow a pea, if you take it up in a day or two, you
will find the fibre below, which is root; the shoot above, which is plant;
and the pea as a now partly exhausted storehouse, looking very woful, and
like the granaries of Paris after the fire. So, the round solid root of a
cyclamen, or the conical one which you know so well as a carrot, are not
properly roots, but permanent storehouses,--only the fibres that grow from
them are roots. Then there are other apparent roots which are not even
storehouses, but refuges; houses where the little plant lives in its
infancy, through winter and rough weather. So that it will be best for you
at once to limit your idea of a root to this,--that it is a group of
growing fibres which taste and suck what is good for the plant out of the
ground, and by their united strength hold it in its place; only remember
the thick limbs of roots do not feed, but only the fine fibres at the ends
of them which are something between tongues and sp