Jill Simpson, age 14, of Gastonia, North Carolina, for her question:

Why does a corn ear have threads of silk ?

An ear of ripe corn comes tightly packaged in a sheath of husky leaves. From the top of the neat package pokes a blond pony tail of rather sticky threads called the corn silks. When tile ear is unwrapped to be cooked, you see that these silky threads run down through the husk and reach the rows of golden kernels on the corn cob. If there were no silks, there would be' no ripe kernel on an ear of corn.

Through three months of summery sunshine and showers, a corn plant brows for one purpose    to produce seeds for the next generation. The seeds are the golden kernels, packed in tight rows around eac:i ear. Like most seeds, they must develop from an egg fertilized by the merging of two parent cells. In the case of the cairn plant., the problem is to get the pairs of male and female cells together.

The stiff green plant grows tall on its jointed stalk. Each joint sprouts a long leaf that wraps a sheath around the stem and dangles down at the tip. The baby ears begin to form, neatly folded in between these leaves and the stiff stem. There may be as many as eight of them.

Meantime, the top of the tall plant  rows a feathery tassel. It may be red or yellow, purple or blue    but in most cases it is pink. The perky tassels produce grains of pollen that contain the male parent cells. The female cells are in the infant kernels, down on the stern and tightly wrapped in leafy husks. If it weren't for the silks, the corn plant could never get its parent cells to  ether.

The problem is solved because the kernels sprout these long sticky threads that grow up through the tops of the husks. The silks pop out like a pony tail, just about when the pollen is ripe in the tassel at the top of the tall plant. At this point we notice that our corn plant does not stand alone. It grows close to dozens of others, all topped with tufted tassels, all with silken pony tails dangling from baby husks folded close to their jointed stems.

Now all is ready and only a friendly breeze is needed to make the mir¬acle work. It blows the ripe pollen from all the tossing tassels, up and down and among the field of corn. Some of the pollen grains stick to the. threads of silk and grow down through the husk to the infant kernels. There they fertilize the female cells and the rows of kernel can develop into ripe seeds. Though the work of the silken threads is done, they remain attached to each ear of corn.

Maybe the corn's wild weedy ancestors could scatter their own seeds. But through thousands of years of pampered cultivation, the seeds of our modern corn are too fat and too crowded to sow themselves. If an ear falls to the ground, the seeds may sprout. But their closely tangled roots soon strangle each other. Hence, our domesticated corn depends on human hands to separate and plant its seeds.