HOLLY BERRIES. 123 



fruits, are thus coloured to attract birds. In the bar- 

 berry you see how the fruits are clustered, so as to 

 mass the colour and to make sure of the fruit catching 

 the eye of the bird-visitor. The rowan-tree has less 

 dense clusters of berries, and the holly is still more 

 modest in respect of its fruit-development. But what 

 holly loses in the size of its clusters, it gains in the 

 brightness of its berries. Against the dark green of 

 the leaves, the berries stand out with great prominence. 



Their after- history is instructive enough. A holly- 

 berry is gobbled up by a bird with ease. What of 

 the seeds the berries contain ? Does digestion, 

 which in a bird is a tolerably rough and mechani- 

 cal process, destroy the seeds ? Not so. The seeds, 

 encased each in its dense tough covering, resist even 

 the digestion of the bird's gizzard and stomach, and 

 they are passed on uninjured through the alimentary 

 tract of the animal. Thus liberated, and the bird 

 being the gainer by its digestion of the soft parts of 

 the berries, the holly-seeds fall into the soil and grow 

 up each in time to the holly-tree. 



Note again, how this interaction between bird and 

 fruit serves another useful purpose. Birds traverse 

 leagues of country in their peregrinations. They may 

 thus convey the holly-seeds to regions hundreds of 

 miles from the parent tree whence the berries were 

 plucked. You begin with the colour of a berry, and 

 you end by securing the distribution of holly-plants 

 far and wide through the agency of the bird. 



We owe much to the dispersal of seeds by such 

 agencies. There is a plant of the New World, the 

 American currant, which long ago was introduced into 

 France, for the sake of the dark red juice of its berries, 

 which was used to colour wines. At Bordeaux this 



