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Updated: June 9, 2025
But they know something of her way of working, and in Lecture VII we shall learn how the invisible fairy sunbeams have been buy here also; how last year's snowdrop plant caught them and stored them up in it's bulb, and how now in the spring, as soon as warmth and moisture creep down into the earth, these little imprisoned sun-waves begin to be active, stirring up the matter in the bulb, and making it swell and burst upwards till it sends out a little shoot through the surface of the soil.
We saw the plantlet buried in it, and learnt how it fed at first on prepared food, but soon began to make living matter for itself out of gases taken from the water through the cells to its stomach the leaves! And how marvellously the sun-waves entering there formed the little green granules, and then helped them to make food and living protoplasm!
We must have clearly pictured in our imagination those countless sun-waves which are for ever crossing space, and especially those larger and slower undulations, the dark heat- waves; for it is these, you will remember, which force the air- atoms apart and make the air light, and it is also these which are most busy in sending water on its travels. But not these alone.
The sun-waves might shake the water-drops as much as they liked and turn them into invisible vapour, but they could not carry them over the earth if it were not for the winds and currents of that aerial ocean which bears the vapour on its bosom, and wafts it to different regions of the world.
It is only in the sunlight that a beautiful delicate green tint is given to them, and you will remember from Lecture II. that this green tint shows that the leaf has used all the sun-waves except those which make you see green; but why should it do this only when it has grown up in the sunshine?
Fancy that you see the water creeping in at the roots, oozing up from cell to cell till it reaches the leaves, and there meeting the carbon which has just come out of the air, and being worked up with it by the sun-waves into starch, or sugar, or oils. But meanwhile, how is new protoplasm to be formed? for without this active substance none of the work can go on.
This particular kind of protoplasm, which is called "chlorophyll," will have nothing to do with the green waves and throws them back, so that every little grain of this protoplasm looks green and gives the leaf its green colour. It is these little green cells that by the help of the sun-waves digest the food of the plant and turn the water and gases into useful sap and juices.
It is true this is one of the hottest parts of the earth, where the sun-waves are most active; but even in our own country many feet of water are drawn up in the summer-time. What, then, becomes of all this water? Let us follow it as it struggles upwards to the sky.
How they are scattered, and many other secrets of the sun-waves, we cannot stop to consider not, but must pass on to ask What work do the sunbeams do for us? They do two things they give us light and heat. It is by means of them alone that we see anything. When the room was dark you could not distinguish the table, the chairs, or even the walls of the room. Why?
So, when you see yourself in a looking-glass, the sun-waves have first played on your face and bounded off from it to the looking-glass; then, when they strike the looking-glass, they are thrown back again on to the retina of your eye, and you see your own face by means of the very waves you threw off from it an instant before. But the reflected light-waves do more for us than this.
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