88 THE FRUITS OF THE COUNTRY-SIDE 



terrestre, the mulberry that grows upon the ground ; not 

 a particularly happy title. It forms the subject of our 

 thirteenth illustration. 



The flowers, as our figure shows, are white and 

 five-petalled, and having in their centres a prominent mass 

 of brownish-yellow stamens that makes a very effective little 

 colour-contrast with the corolla. These little white, earth- 

 born stars strew abundantly the banks and hedgerows and 

 copses from May onward, and are in turn succeeded by 

 the scarlet-crimson fruit. 



One uses the broad term fruit as descriptive of the 

 pistil arrived at maturity, but it is sufficiently evident, 

 on looking around us, that this arrival of fruition fulfils 

 itself in many ways, reveals itself in many forms, a pea- 

 pod, for example, a blackberry, and an acorn being very 

 unlike in appearance. This fruit of the strawberry, in 

 popular diction a berry, is somewhat abnormal in its 

 structure. This any of our readers who have not thought 

 it out will readily realise if they consider that what they 

 term its seeds are upon its outer surface, and that they 

 have always, hitherto, been accustomed to expect to find 

 any seeds, not on the outside certainly, but stowed away 

 within the fruit ; a pea-in-pod-wise or pip-in-apple-like 

 arrangement. These so-called seeds, however, in the 

 strawberry (they are carpels really, each containing a 

 single seed) are scattered over the fleshy receptacle that 

 gives to them a resting-place and to ourselves a succulent 

 and toothsome morsel. 



The strawberry is found extending all over Europe 

 and Northern Africa, throughout Siberia and Western Asia, 

 but not penetrating across the Himalaya to the torrid 



