THE WAY OF A SEED 43 



From this clod he germinated over 80 seeds. The porter- 

 age of these French partridges indicates a useful and quite 

 undesigned form of dispersal. The seas and rivers may 

 carry seeds immense distances, even from one continent to 

 another. And here again is accident. But when all is said 

 the special devices of dispersal have a variety and ingenuity, 

 if one may say so, an unlikelihood, which only Darwin's 

 philosophy can explain. The plants, as it were, work for 

 their own preservation. In autumn they prepare for spring, 

 they send out their children into the world, and the variations 

 of those species that have made preparation best have lived 

 and flourished while the others have perished. 



In England a number of the forms of device are brought 

 unmistakably to the notice of every countryman. You can 

 scarcely walk through a wood and not carry away the 

 heads of some burr or teazel. The grappling-irons of various 

 shapes with which these are equipped are often so complete 

 that they give the burr-head the feeling of being actually 

 sticky, as if there were some gummy substance over them, 

 though the hooks are of hard, almost polished material. 

 They adhere so closely to any woolly substance, to clothes, 

 or the coat of an animal, that they can scarcely be pulled off. 

 It can scarcely be doubted that such species have flourished 

 beyond others because of the development by slow selection 

 of those individual plants which thus achieved the broadcast 

 sowing of their seed here, there and everywhere. Consider- 

 able dispersal may be very necessary to the continuance 

 of a species for other reasons than the mere multiplication 

 of plants in various places, for there is a tendency in some 

 botanical species, as one sees in the fungus fairy rings, to 

 poison, at any rate to exhaust the ground where they have 

 grown for some while. A clover field, for example, needs a 

 seven years' rest before it will grow clover again. Clover, 



