4 oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



elastically the moment they are touched, when fully ripe, and 

 shed their seeds on all sides, like so many small bombshells. Our 

 friend the squirting cucumber, which served as the prime text for 

 this present discourse, falls into somewhat the same category, 

 though in other ways it rather resembles the true succulent fruits, 

 and belongs, indeed, to the same family as the melon, the gourd, 

 the pumpkin, and the vegetable-marrow, almost all of which are 

 edible and in every way fruit-like. Among English weeds, the 

 little bittercress that grows on dry walls and hedge-banks forms 

 an excellent example of the same device. Village children love 

 to touch the long, ripe, brown capsules on the top with one timid 

 finger, and then jump away, half laughing, half terrified, when 

 the mild-looking little plant goes off suddenly with a small bang 

 and shoots its grains like a catapult point-blank in their faces. 



It is in the tropics, however, that these elastic fruits reach 

 their highest development. There they have to fight, not merely 

 against such small fry as robins, squirrels, and harvest-mice, but 

 against the aggressive parrot, the hard-billed toucan, the persist- 

 ent lemur, and the inquisitive monkey. Moreover, the elastic 

 fruits of the tropics grow often on spreading forest trees, and 

 must therefore shed their seeds to immense distances if they are 

 to reach comparatively virgin soil, unexhausted by the deep-set 

 roots of the mother-trunk. Under such exceptional circum- 

 stances, the tropical examples of these elastic capsules are by no 

 means mere toys to be lightly played with by babes and suck- 

 lings. The sand-box tree of the West Indies has large round 

 fruits, containing seeds about as big as an English horsebean; 

 and the capsule explodes, when ripe, with a detonation like a 

 pistol, scattering its contents with as much violence as a shot 

 from an air-gun. It is dangerous to go too near these natural 

 batteries during the shooting season. A blow in the eye from one 

 would blind a man instantly. I well remember the very first 

 night I spent in my own house in Jamaica, where I went to live 

 shortly after the repression of " Governor Eyre's rebellion," as 

 everybody calls it locally. All night long I heard somebody, as I 

 thought, practicing with a revolver in my own back garden ; a 

 sound which somewhat alarmed me under those very unstable 

 social conditions. An earthquake about midnight, it is true, 

 diverted my attention temporarily from the recurring shots, but 

 didn't produce the slightest effect upon the supposed rebel's 

 devotion to the improvement of his marksmanship. "When morn- 

 ing dawned, however, I found it was only a sand-box tree, and 

 that the shots were nothing more than the explosions of the cap- 

 sules. As to the wonderful tales told about the Brazilian cannon- 

 ball tree, I can not personally indorse them from original obser- 

 vation, and will not stain this veracious page with any second- 



