FEBRUARY 29 



spines, defying attack from the most intrepid squirrel. 

 The defences, indeed, are almost too effective. So 

 securely are the seeds locked up in the prickly cones, 

 that it is believed a forest fire is the only natural 

 agency that prevails to liberate them. At all events, 

 the cones never fall from the tree, but remain on the 

 branches during its entire life, without opening for 

 many years, the living seeds biding their time within. 

 Moreover, special provision has been made for their 

 incarceration alive. If it were possible for the cones 

 of a Scots or a Weymouth pine to remain on the 

 branches, they would become imbedded in the wood 

 of the branches; but the obispo manages to keep its 

 cones outside all the time. You may see any day 

 a specimen of this ugly, inhospitable tree at Kew, with 

 all the cones produced in the last five-and-twenty or 

 thirty years set in whorls upon its branches. 



The bishop pine defends its seeds by main force, as it 

 were ; weaker plants resort to various kinds of strata- 

 gem. Thus the Brazilian Cardamine chenopodifolia, 

 a near relative of the common lady's-smock or cuckoo- 

 flower of English meadows, produces two sets of pods, 

 one in the ordinary way, at the end of the flower stalks, 

 and another set underground. The seeds in the upper 

 pods are as numerous as those usually borne by the 

 common cardamine, and take their chance of finding 

 a place where they can germinate ; but those in the 

 subterranean pods are sown by the parent plant in the 

 place where they are meant to grow, reminding one 

 of those Christians, denounced by stern divines, who 

 try to make the best of both worlds. 



