224 THE FRUITS OF THE COUNTRY-SIDE 



ingly-looking sycamore samara as fully as the juiciest pear. 

 The fruit, it must be understood, is always based on the 

 pistil, and when the other constituent parts of the flower, 

 petals, stamens, and so forth, their duty done, have withered 

 away, the pistil develops into the seed-vessel, often very 

 greatly enlarging in bulk, and modifying its form. Within 

 this seed-vessel are the seeds, many or few, and these are 

 either liberated by the opening of the fully-developed re- 

 ceptacle for them, as in the poppy, broom, and thorn-apple, 

 or the whole thing on maturity comes to the ground, as 

 in the case of the apples that we may see lying at the 

 oot of the trees. In this latter case the enclosing envelope 

 gradually decays, and the seed is set free to germinate 

 and set up an independent existence. 



The fruits of all our species of buttercup are built up 

 of a series of fleshy carpels radiating from the centre and 

 arranged into a globular, or sometimes elongated, head ; 

 sometimes rounded at their outer extremities, at others 

 terminating in a small beak, sometimes quite smooth, 

 and in other species wrinkled or covered with small 

 tubercles. The fruits of the spearwort, Ranunculus 

 Flammula, the lesser celandine, R. Ficaria, or the goldi- 

 locks, R, auricomus, are excellent examples of the globular 

 form, while the celery-leaved ranunculus, R. sceleratus, 

 has its very numerous carpels arranged in a very dense 

 cylindrical head. The fruit of the corn crowfoot, R. 

 aruensis, is composed of a few large carpels that are covered 

 on both sides with hooked prickles : it is a particularly 

 quaint form. Buttercups are called ranunculuses, a word 

 derived from rana, a frog, because they are ordinarily found 

 in low marshy ground beloved of frogs, but the corn 



