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Then how comes it that the cylinder of bits of root is so confused, so clumsily fashioned? The reason is this: the worker possesses talent, but the materials do not lend themselves to accurate work. The rootlets supply stumps of very uneven shape and thickness. They include big and small ones, straight and bent, simple and ramified.
Trees are rooted men and men are walking trees. The tree absorbs its earth materials through the minute hairs on its rootlets, called fibrillæ, and the animal body absorbs its nutriment through analogous organs in the intestines, called lacteals. Whitman's expression "the slumbering and liquid trees" often comes to my mind.
The lymphatics seem to start out from the part in which they are found, like the rootlets of a plant in the soil. They carry a turbid, slightly yellowish fluid, called lymph, very much like blood without the red corpuscles.
A cloud of invisible vapor rises from the top of every tree and a thousand invisible rills enter it through its myriad hairlike rootlets. The trees are thus conduits in the circuit of the waters from the earth to the clouds. Our own bodies and the bodies of all living things perform a similar function.
Binney found the specimen growing to the bottom of the trunk of one of the fossil trees with spotted stems, called Sigillaria; and so proved that this curious pitted stone is a piece of fossil root, or rather underground stem, like that which we found in the primrose, and that the little pits or dents in it are scars where the rootlets once were given off.
In the jungles of Borneo I had examined that other swiftly developing fungus which wreaks the vengeance of some of the hill tribes upon those who steal their women; gripping with its microscopic hooks into the flesh; sending quick, tiny rootlets through the skin down into the capillaries, sucking life and thriving and never to be torn away until the living thing it clings to has been sapped dry.
There, to be sure, was the bit of ice he had taken fright at before, nearer than ever; but it floated as harmlessly as the cake just beside it, from whose edges he had gleaned rootlets of young and tender eel-grass not half an hour ago.
To this there is one exception an instructive one, as showing how one action passes into another, and how the same result may be brought about in different ways that of stems which climb by rootlets, such as of ivy and trumpet-creeper. Here the stem ascends by growth alone, taking upward direction, and is fixed by root-lets as it grows.
The keys of the soft maple will soon be ready to fall and send out rootlets, and the winged seeds of the white elm already lie thickly beneath the leafing branches. Each flower invites admiration and study. Dig up the root of the Solomon's seal, a rootstock, the botanists call it.
"Rootlets and tiny twigs and weed stalks and leaves and mud," replied Melody. "Mud!" exclaimed Peter. "Why, that's what Welcome Robin uses in his nest." "Well, Welcome Robin is my own cousin, so I don't know as there's anything so surprising in that," retorted Melody. "Oh," said Peter. "I had forgotten that he is a member of the Thrush family."
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