“food chain - the vitally important system by which matter from soil and air passes through plants and animals and back to soil and air. It is this system upon which all life depends.” — Richard M. Ketchum Copy Share Image
“A year earlier, representatives of thirteen states had assembled in Philadelphia and declared their intention to form a more perfect union, but what had come of their declaration was a long way from being a union, let alone a perfect one, and Schuyler, along with all his other problems, was caught up in one of the regional rivalries that would… — Richard M. Ketchum Copy Share
“The most important surviving relics of the primitive plants are mosses and ferns, which give us a clue to how ancient plants solved the… — Richard M. Ketchum Copy Share Image
“We know a great deal more than the Greeks did about the forces of life. But with all our knowledge, no one fully comprehends the miraculous process, known as photosynthesis, by which trees and other green plants use energy from the sun to transform elements into food for themselves at the same time that they release oxygen into the atmosphere.… — Richard M. Ketchum Copy Share
“By the time a tree is full-grown, the underground root system is enormous; a mature oak tree, for example, has literally hundreds of miles of roots to tap the soil’s resources in an endless quest for water. Each drop is collected by the root hairs and passed along, from one cell to the next, up the trunk and to the… — Richard M. Ketchum Copy Share
“The purpose was to insure that their regular pollinators - animals that would best serve the plant, not chance visitors that raided its pollen and nectar - would be most likely to revisit it. Flowers that are fertilized by bees, for instance, are hardly ever red since most bees have difficulty seeing this color. The motion of certain flowers in… — Richard M. Ketchum Copy Share
“The first forests about which anything is known were made up of the simplest kinds of plants, all of them spore-produced - horsetails, club… — Richard M. Ketchum Copy Share Image
“Our people are not calculated to be confined in garrisons or kept in any particular service; they soon grow troublesome and uneasy by reflecting… — Richard M. Ketchum Copy Share Image
“Photosynthesis, the activity that ultimately makes all life possible, permits plants to trap energy from the sun and store it in the form of… — Richard M. Ketchum Copy Share Image
“To understand how the first tree appeared on Earth, we must look back more than 3 billion years to Earth’s cooling off and changing… — Richard M. Ketchum Copy Share Image
“In their urge for survival, the seed-bearing trees hit upon countless different devices for carrying pollen from one flower to another, but essentially the… — Richard M. Ketchum Copy Share Image
“A plant has been defined as a living thing that absorbs in microscopic amounts over its surface all that it needs for growth. Through” — Richard M. Ketchum Copy Share Image
“food chain - the vitally important system by which matter from soil and air passes through plants and animals and back to soil and… — Richard M. Ketchum Copy Share Image
