DR. FRANK CRANE’S DAILY EDITORIAL

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 66, 9 June 1927, Page 16

DR. FRANK CRANE’S DAILY EDITORIAL

THE LEAF ( Copyright j 1927.) most important of all living things is the leaf. Many leaves such as spinach, lettuce, etc., are eaten raw in salads or cooked directly. Most of the foods, however, begin with a leaf and result in a fruit or vegetable. Apples, pears and other fruit, to say nothing of tomatoes and bananas, are all a modification of living forms in some way or other. The tree is nothing but the developed leaf, as all tree trunks start with a leafy bud. The leaf products eaten by man produce a certain amount of heat as nourishment. Burned in the fire they give out a definite amount of light and heat. Dr. Gager, of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, said in a recent address that Dean Swift s description of extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers for later use during raw seasons are not so absurd after all. The most striking effect of the vegetation of the earth is its green leaves. Even when these do not appear green, as in copper-leaved beeches, the green colouring matter is. there, but it is overwhelmed by the presence of another pigment. Now this leaf-green depends upon sunlight and it might be called, without too greatly stretching the truth, capsuled sunlight. The leaf-blade also gets water and various salts from the soil, oxygen and dioxide gas from the air. This process can only take place in the presence of light, and is perhaps the most fundamental of all the processes of life. So the food that we eat, whether vegetable or animal, the clothing we weal-, cotton, woollen or silk, the frame dwellings in which some of us live and the wood, coal, gas and electricity that heat and light our buildings depend eventually upon green leaves. Most of our butter and milk comes from .animals that feed on leaves. All the wood and coal in the world was formerly inside of a green leaf and the heat and light of our house is the sunlight of previous geological ages captured first by green leaves and stored up in our coal mines. When Adam and Eve, according to tradition, made for themselves clothing of fig leaves it was an act typical of all future clo.thing as well as of all future nourishment of the race. If you are going to be a heathen and worship strange gods, we might recommend to you as an object of adoration the green leaf.