Eleanor Stackhouse Atkinson

“ Then, sometimes, they like to plaster their red and brown and gray-splotched, hairless bodies with mud, and go to sleep in the sun just like pigs. The only thing that will keep them out of a field is a bon-fire. ”

“ All summer a plant is busy feeding itself, growing and bringing up seed babies. But in the fall the leaves close their mouths and stop pulling up water. They know hard times are coming, when there will be little water to draw upon. So they must stop giving water to the air. They seem to rob themselves of the food they no longer need, and to send it all into ripening seeds, into the roots, and into next year's leaf-buds that form at the base of the leaf stalks. ”

“ Food for the seeds, when they begin to grow, is stored in fruits and nuts, into thickened stems like lily bulbs, into tubers like potatoes, and into grains of corn and wheat. Everything is done to keep the plant alive over the winter, and to give it a new start in the spring.When you see bare, leafless trees blowing in the winter gale, and often loaded with snow, they look dead. But they are only asleep, like the squirrel and the bee, with their food safely stored away. ”

“ He doesn't try to avoid trouble as the more timid hippopotamus does.
The rhinoceros is a grazing animal, too, but does not find his food in the water. He feeds by night on wooded hillsides, in the brush or on swamps, and uses his nose-horn to pry up roots and his horse teeth to bite off grass. During the heat of the day he often takes a cool bath and rolls in the mud. Very likely he goes into the water many times for the same reason as the elephant. He is tormented by flies and stinging insects. Like the elephant he, too, has a feathered friend. ”

“ If caught young the baby hippopotamus is easily tamed, but he isn't bright enough to learn tricks. When his keeper comes to his cage he opens his two-foot wide mouth and begs for food in the most comical way. He asks for it much as a pig does. At home a herd of hippopotamuses at play shout with loud, harsh voices, but in a cage they creak and groan and squeal like very rusty hinges of a door.When a herd of hippopotamuses in the Nile River becomes tired of a diet of water plants, they climb up higher and steeper banks than you could climb, break into fields and eat wheat and sugar cane. ”

“ When he dives, he shuts his nose holes to keep out water, as the camel and giraffe shut theirs, to keep out sand.
Like other hoofed animals, the hippopotamus lives in herds and feeds on plants. From two to three dozen live together on the banks and in the beds of the warm rivers of Africa. They are not as bright as elephants, neither are they stupid. Not more than one or two of a herd are ever caught in the same kind of trap. Where hunters are about, the hippopotamus does not snort and blow when he comes up to breathe. Sometimes a herd leaves a place that is much hunted. ”

“ If attacked, a hippopotamus fights ferociously A big bull hippopotamus will swim under a boat and tip it over, or bite a big piece out of the side, with his huge bark-cutting teeth. He chases the men in the water and gores them with his tusks. There are terrible "rogue," or tramp hippos, too, as there are among elephants.
A mother hippopotamus is the fiercest of all, if anything threatens her baby. She has only one at a time, and she makes it her chief business to look after him. He isn't born a swimmer, so for a long time he lives mostly on his mother's back. ”

“ Even in the spider, which, on the outside, is so much like the lobster, the intestine instead of being one long tube, begins to be folded, because the growth of the brain crowds it into a smaller space. The spider is much "smarter" than the lobster. She (for it is the lady spider that is so "smart") has to be much cleverer than the lobster, to catch food for herself and her little ones. She must catch flying insects with a web that she must make for herself. She must do this, not only for herself but for her babies. The lobster and crawfish lay their eggs and then go away and leave them. ”

“ The new plant food made in the leaves is sent back to all the growing parts of the plant where it is needed. Some of it stays in the leaves to build them larger. Some goes into flowers, fruit and seeds. In grasses and straight-veined plants without bark, the new plant food goes to every part. But in plants that grow by adding a new ring every year, the green cells form a layer between the old wood and the bark. ”

“ Knowing that he sees badly and charges straight, a skilled horseman can dodge him. A lion leaps over him, tucks his tail between his legs and sneaks away. An elephant that stands twice as high, often weighs but very little more, and is no match at all for this big brute. The rhinoceros can run his nose under the elephant's body and kill him with one stroke of his dagger horn. ”

“ Nature seems to do a good deal of her counting in that way. She fits the parts of things together by ones and twos and threes. Plant and animal life begin with just one cell. The growth of a plant begins with just one shoot. Sometimes there are already two leaves on it when it comes above ground. But it always begins, either above or below ground, with a single shoot. Then come two leaves, making three parts. As it branches, each branch begins as a single shoot. ”

“ It is not so easy to catch plants at work, as it is to catch squirrels, but if you have very sharp eyes and minds you can do it. All plants above the fungi, earn their own living. In all green plants the roots get food from the earth, and the leaves get food from the air. The two kinds of food come together in the leaves, and the sun mixes and changes them into plant cells.
In the story about water you learned that water never runs up hill. Then how does water get from far down in the ground to the top of a tree? ”

“ They would surely have thought the hippopotamus a land whale.The hippopotamus has a body as long as the elephant's. It is from ten to fifteen feet around the middle, but the animal's thick legs are so short that he stands only five or six feet from the ground. Really his legs are better for swimming than for walking. He has the small, dull eyes of the pig sunk in folds of skin, small ears, a wrinkled, scowling forehead, a mouth two feet wide, and a bulging upper lip. He can use his sharp-edged tusks for rooting and for fighting, as the wild boar uses his tusks. ”

“ If you melt salt in water and then put it in the sun, the water will pass away as vapor, but the salt will be left in the glass.
Minerals will not burn. If you burn wood you have a little heap of ashes left. The ashes are the minerals that were in the wood. Plants do not like rain-water as they do well-water. They must have water that has gone down into the earth and taken up minerals. That is the reason why plants are so made that they get all their water through the roots.
You might think that plants drink the rain that falls on their leaves and stems. They don't. ”

“ VIII. Why Plants are Like Squirrels Did you ever see a squirrel gathering acorns and nuts in the autumn? All summer long squirrels eat their food as they find it, bring up their babies, grow fat themselves and play a great deal. But when the first frost sends the nuts rattling to the ground, they know winter is coming. So they lay away a good store of food, in some safe place, to last them through "hard times." ”

“ They are rather timid and peaceable animals. When they hear a sound, or smell something they do not understand, they sink under water with only their noses above, and stand motionless, hidden among water plants. ”

“ The new green layer makes the heart wood just that much larger, so the bark has to stretch to fit it. You know your skin stretches as you grow larger or become fatter, doesn't it? Maybe this stretching, year after year, is what makes the bark on hard wood trees crack in long deep ridges. ”

“ How busy he is, and how hard he works!
Plants are just like squirrels. They eat and grow all summer, feed their flower babies until they are ripe seeds, then they store food to last them until the Spring. ”

“ If they had to support their families they would have to learn to bebrighter, too. We learn in doing things for ourselves; but we learn the most and the fastest when we do things for others. That's nature's way of teaching living things multiplication. ”

“ But in the story of the world, as we find it written in the Book of Nature, it is the children who first tell the story, if we will only look and listen very closely.Even the crawfish's legs and the spider's legs have seven joints. In those members of the crawfish and lobster family where there are fewer than seven joints, either some of these joints have grown together, or they have shrunk up, from not being used, until they don't look or act like joints at all. ”

“ And if those old Norsemen who used to roam over the northern seas in big row boats had seen the animal, these are the things they would have noticed: He can stay under water from five to eight minutes, he spouts when he comes up for air, his naked skin is oiled so he can slip through the water easily, and under that skin is a thick layer of solid fat. ”

“ They merely use rain to wash their faces. They need to wash the dust out of their skin pores, just as you do. Ask them if this is not true. Leaves will talk, as they are supposed to do in fairy stories, if you know their language. This is one way to ask leaves if they drink through their leaf-pores, or through their roots. ”