Show I 0 L The Green Mystery 1 IF 11 F YOU have the Sherlock Holmes detective instinct and want to study a mystery more mor e baffling I than the most complicated crime go ou out outto t to your backyard garden If you haven't haven a gar g garden ar arden den just look at the different vegetables tables on the th e table next time you sit down to dinner This is the mystery You can take a load of soil plant a seed i in n it and by mysterious alchemy that seed will gradually gradually gradually grad grad- change part of the soil into a cabbage But use a different seed and the S same soil will 1 evolve into an onion a radish or a cluster o of f lettuce What is it that can produce so man many y different forms of vegetable life out of the same sam e substance substance earth earth At the dhe state experiment farm Wooster 0 O. I scientists took a tract of fifty acres Th The soil soi l was the same everywhere on that tract yet this year it will yield a harvest of 2000 differ different nf varieties of vegetables and fruits Pick up a handful of dirt anywhere on that fifty acres an and andI d I you have those 2000 different crops in concentrated concentrated concentrated concen concen- form on your palm Up in Portage lake Ontario C Canada nada an island burned over I Nothing Nothing Noth Noth- ing was left but ashes Six years ears w went nt by and a naturalist visiting the island counted 1426 different different dif dif- dif dif- ferent kinds of trees and shrubbery All of which are just a different form of the same swine substance earth Roger Williams William s founder of Rhode Island died in 1683 In 1866 his grave was opened The coffin had disappeared gone disappeared gone back to dust So had Roger Williams Williams even even his skeleton Someone Some Someone Someone one had dropped an apple seed overhead It sprouted into a tree whose roots crept down and spread out in the form of a skeleton and in the exact position once occupied by Rogers Roger's bones I I That apple tree commented one of the diggers is lis Roger Williams At least its it's the same substance in different form Your body is made of earth earth dust Look at your hand The dust of which it t is composed at various times in the past has been part of millions millions mil mil- lions of growing things Concentrated in ill you is the identical substance or dust that once formed the tusk of a charging mammoth the wing of a giant prehistoric bird or the leaf of a monster fern Some day again the dust that makes up your body will live and move in other forms of life It may be a tree an insect or a stalk of c corn rn The change goes on forever out forever out of the dust deist back to the dust In the file puzzle of what can I make that dust become animated In in millions o of different forms you have that greatest mystery I the riddle of life mysterY mysterY-I I |