154 OTTB COMMON FKUITS. 



order to impel the stamens to discharge their office of 

 fructifying the central organ ; but as experimentalizing 

 botanists are not always at hand to tickle them into com- 

 pliance, Nature has provided for their being commonly 

 urged into fulfilling her behests, by making the flowers 

 specially attractive to insects it may be, even by that 

 very odour so offensive to human nostrils and the busy 

 tribes thus drawn to settle on them, in pushing their way 

 among the irritable stamens, soon vex them into that 

 violent rush towards the pistil which is requisite to induce 

 its fructification. Further consequences ensue from this 

 peculiar endowment; for just as "where the body is, 

 there the eagles gather together," so, and for like reason, 

 where insects are, there little birds are sure to flock ; and 

 though the fruit is too acid to tempt them into making 

 that an article of diet, singing birds, especially bull and 

 goldfinches, are especially fond of resorting to the bar- 

 berry-bush to build their nests in its thorn-protected 

 branches, and profit by the feast provided in its swarms 

 of insect visitants. This of itself would suffice to make 

 the plant unwelcome to those short-sighted cultivators 

 who hold the feathered race in deadly hatred as devourers 

 of their grain, hearing in their sweetest songs only the 

 impudent triumph of successful plunderers ; but this is 

 a prejudice abandoned by the more enlightened, who re- 

 cognize the destruction of many insects as a service out- 

 weighing the consumption of a few seeds. But however 

 the plant might have been forgiven for harbouring birds 

 now acknowledged to be harmless or even useful it is 

 less easy to pardon its attractiveness to the lesser winged 

 guests which allure them, and which are by no means 

 proved to be innocuous to crops ; for, indeed, it seems no 

 unplausible theory that, among the atomic crowd drawn 

 together by the fascinations of the barberry-blossoms, 

 may be some minute agent of a blight in corn, which, 

 when it finds itself in proximity to a more congenial 

 abode, may abandon its first resting-place on the shrub 

 to effect a more pernicious lodgment in the grain. If 

 this theory be correct, the old opinion of the barberry 

 being injurious to corn, scoffed at as a mere superstition 



