192 THE RING OF NATURE 



itself. In John's Flowers of the Field, edited by 

 Clarence Elliott, we read that a twisted capsule, 

 if moistened and laid on a sheet of paper, ' will, in 

 its effort to straighten itself, soon crawl an inch or 

 more away from the spot on which it was laid.' 



The geranium shoots its seeds about three yards. 

 An exotic artillerist Hura crepitans, like a box of 

 brazil nuts, goes off with a bang, like a pistol, and 

 shoots its seeds fifteen or twenty yards. The 

 reader can find for himself what are the accomplish- 

 ments of others of our common shooting plants 

 such as the broom, the balsam, and the yellow 

 wood-sorrel, common in every greenhouse. 



Goethe gave in his Travels in Italy the following 

 account of the artillery performances of Acanthus 

 mollis : 



' I had brought home several seed capsules and 

 put them away in an open box, when one night I 

 heard a crackling noise, and immediately afterwards 

 a sound like the impact of small bodies against the 

 walls and ceiling. I could not understand it at 

 first, but found afterwards that my pods had burst 

 and scattered their seeds all over the place. The 

 dryness of the room had caused the fruits to ripen 

 in a few days to the requisite degree of elasticity.' 



Thus we can hear the broom pods crackling on 

 a hot day as they shoot their seeds and colonize a 

 further stretch of the field. We can take a pod or 

 two home, and fixing them in the centre of a table 

 measure the energy with which they burst. 



But to shoot a seed even five yards is not to get 



