820 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ornamental flowers than any other family of plants in the whole world. 

 Among a widely-different group we get other herbs which lay by rich 

 stores of starch, or similar nutritious substances, in thickened under- 

 ground branches, known as tubers ; such, for example, are the potato 

 and the Jerusalem artichoke. Sometimes the root itself is the store- 

 house for the accumulated food-stuffs, as in the dahlia, the carrot, the 

 radish, and the turnip. In all these cases, the plant obviously derives 

 benefit from the habit which it has acquired of hiding away its reserve 

 fund beneath the ground, where it is much less likely to be discovered 

 and" eaten by its animal foes. For it is obvious that these special reser- 

 voirs of energetic material, which the plant intends as food for its own 

 flower or for its future offspring, are exactly those parts which animals 

 will be likely unfairly to appropriate to their personal use. What feeds 

 a plant will feed a squirrel, a mouse, a pig, or a man, just as well. Each 

 requires just the same free elements, whose combination with oxygen 

 may yield it heat and movement. Thus it happens that the parts of 

 plants which we human beings mainly use as food-stuffs are just the 

 organs where starch has been laid by for the plant's own domestic 

 economy seeds, as in the pea, bean, wheat, maize, barley, rice, or mil- 

 let ; tubers, as in tbe potato and Jerusalem artichoke ; corns, as in the 

 yam or tare ; and roots, as in arrow-root, turnip, parsnip and carrot. 

 In all these, and in many other cases, the habit first set up by Nature 

 has been sedulously encouraged and increased by man's deliberate se- 

 lection. What man thus consciously effects in a few generations, the 

 survival of the fittest has unconsciously effected through many long 

 previous ages of native development. Knowledge. 



-<y*+~- 



THE JAVANESE CALENDAR* 



By J. A. C. OUDEMANS. 



THE Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans regulated their most impor- 

 tant field-labors, the sowing and gathering of their crops, etc., 

 by their observations of the movements of the heavenly bodies, as the 

 rising and setting of the stars. It is obvious that this system gives 

 only an approximation to the true time ; for not only the time of the 

 rising and setting of the stars, but also the relative situation of the 

 stars to each other, is changed by the precession of the equinoxes. 

 Notwithstanding this, this system is still used by some cf the less civ- 

 ilized peoples of the East Indies ; and, although the Dutch Government 

 employs the Gregorian calendar exclusively in its colonies, the Javan- 



* J. A. C. Oudemans, Medcdeeling betreffende dc sterrebeclden, wier hoogte boven 

 den Ilorizen, op eon bepaald oogenblick van den nacht, door do Javancn ten beboewe 

 van de lanbouw geraadpleegd wordt. Amsterdam, 1881. 



