Word: tree
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Even in the simplest organisms, the protoplasm seems to have a goal; it knows what it wants to do. Starting with the single small blob in a fertilized egg cell, it inexorably grows to a special form-frog, pine tree or man. Inert, unorganized matter flows into the growing organism and is at once transformed by the touch of its life. It becomes alive; it creeps or flies or sings or loves. When matter is touched by man's protoplasm, the kind with the highest purpose, it becomes extremely complicated, with thoughts and aspirations that defy scientific pinpointing...
LIKE all the other muscles of the human body, the heart muscle itself requires freshly oxygenated blood to live. It gets its supply from the coronary arteries, which sprout from the trunk of the arterial tree, the aorta, and divide into hundreds of smaller branches to feed back into the heart muscle some of the arterial blood that the heart has just previously pumped...
Across eastern India and Pakistan, monsoon rains swept in mighty torrents between the Himalayas and the sea. In the heart of the populous Ganges valley, 10,000 villages crumbled and vanished, and farmers shared tree trunks with cobras in the worst floods since 1871. In the coastal state of Orissa, eight rivers thundered simultaneously into spate, killing at least 150, inundating 3,500 sq. mi. of drought-seared cropland. The state's 138 legislators dropped everything and rushed homeward to find out their families' fate...
That was several weeks ago, but so massive was the damage that air force planes last week still dropped goods and medicines to people clinging to floating tree trunks and housetops, almost daily added other places to the disaster list. Orissa's finance minister said: "We still do not know what s happening because we have not made contact with 25% of the villages." After a flying survey of the subcontinental ruin, the International Red Cross's Dr. François Daubenton estimated that the floods had wrecked 28,000 villages, damaged or destroyed the homes...
...elephant heaves up a trunk as thick as a small tree, curls it back as delicately as a debutante's pinky, and with exquisite precision wipes a bit of foreign matter...