1 82 IN LOWER FLORIDA WILDS 



tanical celebrity and a veritable globe trotter. It 

 grows all over the warmer parts of America, Poly- 

 nesia, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Formerly 

 placed by botanists in the Laurel family, now, 

 perhaps on account of its notoriety, it is made the 

 representative of a separate group, the Cassy- 

 thaceae, and ours is the Cassytha filiformis. The 

 fruit is a sort of drupe eagerly devoured by birds, 

 and the hard, indigestible seeds are thus dispersed. 

 The whole fruit is also very buoyant, keeping its 

 vitality a long time in salt water, so it has two 

 very efficient means of distribution. Its seeds 

 usually fall to the earth and germinate after the 

 manner of ordinary seeds, and the vine itself 

 sometimes lives out its life as ordinary normal 

 vegetation does. But if any weeds or shrubs grow 

 near it the little Cassytha vine creeps towards 

 them along the ground until it can lay hold of 

 one of their stems and begin to twine up it. As it 

 does so it emits little rootlets which penetrate the 

 host and draw the already elaborated sap from 

 it; thus it changes into a true parasite, and the 

 main stem which connects it with the ground, now 

 useless, decays. The growth of the dodders takes 

 place in precisely the same manner. 



