SEED BEARING AN EFFORT 67 



for instance, which spring up, flower, and wither away 

 in the course of one or two seasons (annuals and 

 biennials, pp. 71, 74). And it happens even with quite 

 large plants such as the AGAVE (fig. 14) which is 

 planted so much as fencing along railway lines : and 

 with even the giant Talipot Palm, one of the largest 

 of all Palms, which may grow on for thirty, fifty, or 

 even a hundred years, and attain a height of a 

 hundred feet, with a stem a couple of feet thick. 

 For when at last a branched flowering axis is 

 shot up and has ripened its hundreds and thousands 

 of seeds, the whole gigantic palm dies, and rapidly 

 decays (multiennials, p. 74). 



That with the common AGAVE death is due to the 

 effort of providing for the next generation is recognized 

 in the common practice of cutting down the flowering 

 shoots, whose truncated and bent stems are a familiar 

 sight along our Indian railway lines. 



It is for a similar reason that grass cut -for hay is 

 much more nutritious just before or * at the time of 

 flowering than after the seed has ripened. For the 

 flowering stems are then full of sugar and other food- 

 material passing up from the underground parts to the 

 seed. Later on they are little more than woody stalks, 

 and the seeds which contain the food-material soon drop 

 off and are lost. 



For the same reason the worst time for moving 

 bulbs and tubers is just at flowering time, or after, 

 for they are then at their weakest, having given up 

 their sugar or other food substance to feed the seeds. 



13. Reviewing all these plants whose germination 

 we have been studying, we see that they fall naturally 



