INTELLIGENCE OF FLOWERS 



ungrateful corners to which a pinch of mould has strayed. 

 They are two varieties of wild Lucern or Medick [Med- 

 icago), two "ill weeds" in the humblest sense of the word. 

 One bears a reddish flower, the other a little yellow ball the 

 size of a pea. To see them crawling and hiding among the 

 proud grasses, one would never suspect that, long before the 

 illustrious geometrician and chemist of Syracuse, they had 

 discovered the Archimedean screw and endeavoured to apply 

 it not to the raising of liquids, but to the art of flying. They 

 lodge their seeds in delicate spirals, with three or four con- 

 volutions, admirably constructed to delay their fall and, con- 

 sequently, with the help of the wind, to prolong their jour- 

 ney through the air. One of them, the yellow, has even 

 improved upon the apparatus of the red by furnishing the 

 edges of the spiral with a double row of spikes, with the evi- 

 dent intention of hooking it, on its passage, to either the clothes 

 of the pedestrians or the fleece of the animals. It clearly 

 hopes to add the advantages of eriophily — that is to say the 

 dissemination of seed by sheep, goats, rabbits and so on — to 

 those of anemophily, or dissemination by the wind. 



The most touching side of this great effort is its futility. 

 The poor red and yellow Lucerns have blundered. Their re- 



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