Fruit and Its Use to the Plant. 99 



oranges, and bread fruits are developed from globular 

 bunches of flowers, all parts of which, even the bracts, help 

 to make up the juicy or starchy fruit. A pineapple is a 

 similar development of a dense band of flowers, which grow 

 below the leafy summit of the plant. Dandelion parachutes 

 and thistle-down may be consid- 

 ered part of the seed-like fruits 

 which they bear in the wind. 



In studying fruits it must be 

 constantly kept in mind that the 

 chief use of a seed vessel is to 

 distribute seeds, not to protect 

 them.* The stiff, hooked hairs 

 on burclover pods, and hundreds of other fruits, enable them 

 to get free rides to fields as yet unplanted by their kind. 

 The styles of clematis and mountain mahogany become 

 feathery tails; the twin carpels of maple put forth wings, 

 and the calyx limbs of lettuce spread like silken parachutes, 

 that the seeds may go with the wind to new homes. 



Classify your fruits by separating (i) those which have 

 no apparent means of transportation from (2) those which 

 have. Then divide the last into (a) those which get free 

 rides and (b) those that pay their fare. 



Which of the former are carried by the wind ? Which 

 by animals ? What kind of animals do they cling to ? How 



*A notable exception occurs in a kind of dwarf mountain pine of this coast, 

 the cones of which usually remain closed until a forest fire leaves only the 

 charred trunks, bearing whorls of cones nearly to the base. These, some of them 

 more than twenty years old, soon open and reseed the ground. The fruit coats of 

 akenes and grains are overcoats for the solitary seeds, thus doing double duty. 



