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these cases and in hundreds of others the fruit is a pod and opens 

 at maturity to let tlie seeds escape, but there are also hundreds of 

 kinds of plants in which the ovary ripens with a single seed inside 

 of it and does not open at maturity. In this case the fruit is usually 

 but little larger than the contained seed and often looks like a seed 

 itself. However that be, a single-seeded dry fruit that does not open 

 at maturity is called an cikene. Akenes are what we find in the bur. 



How do I know? How can you tell in other cases? Unfamiliar 

 akenes found away from the parent plant might not be so easily 

 detected, for the single seed within is not always readily found free 

 from the ovary walls, but it can usually be identified by its relation 

 to the plant. You remember that the seed is borne loithin the 

 ovary. The pea pod and the morning glory and nasturtium pods 

 you know were closed up tight to the time of maturity. But this 

 bur never was nor could have been closed, evidently. In all prob- 

 ability then it is not an ovary. What then ? The purple colors of 

 our young bur were borne, we remember, at the top of each bur. 

 These blossom-tops, we can think out now, were masses of pinky- 

 purple flowers, each bur containing many small flowers. The whole 

 is called a compound flower. Each of the little bi'own wrinkled 

 fruits within the bur is an cikene^ the fruit of a single flower. Per- 

 haps we shall find crowning some of the akenes the withered 

 remains of the flowers. The tiny blossom was one of several that 

 grow inside the big bur ; and each little blossom makes, or tries to 

 make, an akene. 



Of course the seed within the akene germinates and produces a 

 new plant just as any other seed does. Because of Sir Bur's adroit- 

 ness at stealing rides, the new little burdock plant usually finds its 

 chance at greater or less distances from its parent plant, and reaps 

 much the same advantage as any pioneer. In favorable circum- 

 stances it finds freedom from the competition of its kind, that is, it 

 does not have to struggle with its fellows for the same food-stuffs, 

 the same conditions of growth and health. It has room. 



Indeed, it is because of his travelling powers that Sir Bur is here 

 at all, for his race originated in Europe. He was not in New Eng- 

 land to greet the pilgrims, as they left Plymouth Rock^ nor in the 



m 



