MAN EATS MUCH FRUIT 



from the upper branches of trees by their toes, with their 

 heads tucked away under their wings. When disturbed a 

 little fox-like head appears, and after much chattering, 

 scolding, and expostulation, the creature unhooks itself and 

 flies away with a strong flight not unlike that of a crow. 

 Horses are occasionally fed on peaches in Chile. Rats eat 

 the coff*ee cherry, and do a great deal of harm in coff'ee 

 plantations. 



In Cashmir the mulberry and other fruit trees are some- 

 times visited by sportsmen, who often find bears feeding on 

 the fruits. Pigs, of course, eat all sorts of fruit, and several 

 other mammals do the same, but it is especially monkeys 

 that live chiefly on fruit. They plunder the banana planta- 

 tions, and in South Africa melon-patches require to be most 

 carefully watched to prevent baboons from destroying them. 



It is said that the baboons watch the plantations from a 

 distance, and will only come down if they think no one is 

 there : so five people walk to the patch, and while four go 

 away again, one of them remains in hiding to shoot the 

 baboons, who cannot tell the difference between four and 



Man himself is, and has always been, a great eater of fruit. 

 Not only so, but he has enormously improved and altered 

 wild fruits until they are modified into monsters of the most 

 extraordinary kind. The ordinary wild gooseberry weighs 

 about 5 dwt. But even in the year 1786 some of the 

 cultivated forms weighed double this amount (10 dwt,), 

 and in 1852 gooseberries which weighed more than 37 

 dwt. were in existence. What size the largest big 

 gooseberry may be this year is not very easy to say, because 

 the public Press is at slack times too energetic about the 

 question. The most usual way of improving fruits is by 



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