"The king was in his counting house, counting out his money." Kings have not always given their first attention to the welfare of their subjects.

   Man is "king" of all the animals. He writes the books and says so. But there are no plants which publish claims to authority, so it may be a question just which one heads up the Plant Kingdom.

   That doesn't matter anyway for his subjects really count for more than a king. In this case there are 250,000 different kinds of subjects, but no one has ever tried to even guess how many individuals.

   We took a census once of just the trees growing in Mt. Pleasant,-an unusually nice little town. They added up 15,998 individual trees. We would have been crazy, of course, to have at­tempted to count the dandelions or the grass plants, or the bacteria. A project like that might help solve the unemployment problem of the post war period.

   So much for random thoughts. Since there are some Important things that should be said about plants, we'll get on to a few of them.

   Moisture, an acceptable temperature, and for most plants, soil and sunlight are necessary for their growth. Where all of these conditions prevail in highly satisfactory degrees, plants are most abundant and at their best. In moist tropical areas plants if left to themselves grow into the nearly impenetrable Jungle. Once the Jungle growth is removed and such an area set with useful plants, the yield may be prodigious.

   Temperate regions for part of the year are too cold or may have such limited rainfall as to support only a fair plant coverage. Deserts have everything else, yet grow but little for want of moisture. The seas have the moisture and usually the food materials and sufficient warmth. In their upper strata the water courses often produce a prolific plant growth but fall at greater depths through being unable to meet the light requirement. As the poles are approached, temperature becomes the limiting factor and plant life while present, is greatly reduced in size and in numbers of species and of individuals.

   Plants are age-old. Even at the dawn of the Cambrian period- some would say nearly a billion years ago-many of the simpler plants had made a good start. Ferns have been on the way perhaps half a billion years while flowering plants have likely been beautifying the world with their blossoms and fragrance for more than fifty million years. Plant styles have undergone many changes through these long ages and numerous species have flourished for a time and then become extinct. Abundant fossil remains reveal vegetation growths that In some ways greatly out-stripped the best we know today.