3i6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



if I may venture so to describe it, is tlie skunk among vegetables. 

 Its object in life, its sole aim and desire, is to deter animals from 

 eating its fruit and seeds ; and therefore it makes itself as un- 

 pleasant and as inconspicuous as it possibly can. It is green, so 

 that animals may not readily detect its presence among its leaves ; 

 it is spine-clad, so that they may not attack it with their tender 

 noses ; it is nasty to the taste and disagreeable to the smell, so 

 that they may avoid its neighborhood when once they have 

 learned to know its personal peculiarities. If a goat or a donkey, 

 wandering among the scrub, chances to touch the long, trailing 

 branches, the cucumber squirts out its juice in his eyes, and at the 

 same time sows its seeds all round on a spot where no hostile 

 creature is likely to interfere with them. We have here in a very 

 extreme form a s^jecimen of that rare type of succulent fruit 

 which does not lay itself out at all to attract the attention of 

 friendly animals, but, on the contrary, endeavors energetically to 

 repel them. 



The mass of the gourd-kind, however, pursue the exactly 

 opposite tactics. They have learned by experience to imitate 

 rather a policy of conciliation, and to turn the birds, quadrupeds, 

 and fruit-eating animals generally in their environment from 

 deadly foes into friendly disseminators. For this purpose, their 

 fruits, when ripe and fit for seeding, become red, yellow, pink, or 

 orange, though they only assume these brilliant hues at the exact 

 moment when the seeds are ready to be severed from the parent 

 stem and dispersed for germination. Till that time, they remain 

 green and sour, or at least tasteless. The seeds in these cases are 

 surrounded by a soft, sweet* pulp, especially noticeable in the 

 melon and the watermelon ; and this pulp the plant gives in, so to 

 speak, as an inducement to animals to disseminate its seeds over 

 the surrounding country. It has learned organically the value of 

 rotation of crops. It desires fresh soil in which to expand. The 

 actual seeds themselves, however, are not sweet ; they are inclosed 

 in a hard and somewhat horny or leathery shell ; and they are 

 seldom eaten and still seldomer digested by birds or animals, ow- 

 ing to their tough and slippery surfaces. We have here, then, the 

 very same inducements of food, sweetness, perfume, and color 

 expended by the plant upon its fruit for the sake of its seeds 

 that we saw before expended upon the flower for the sake of ob- 

 taining cross-fertilization by the aid of insects. 



At the same time, it is interesting to note that almost all the 

 gourd family possess in some part or other of their economy certairi 

 bitter, nauseating, medicinal principles, expressly intended to deter 

 animals from meddling with or eating them. But these bitter 

 principles are variously distributed in the leaves, stems, stock, or 

 fruit, according to the special type of dangers to which the par 



