8o Goitrd ( Cucurbitacece ) . [No.io 



Fruit, eight to ten cucumbers in a crowded cluster, each 

 egg-shape, one half inch long, becoming dry, not 

 splitting in ripening, filled by the one seed, covered 

 by barbed and easily-detached bristles. A pepo. 



Found, in damp and waste places from Canada to Florida 

 and westward. 



A weak, hairy vine, herbaceous, with branching stems, 

 climbing extensively by half of its abundant forked and 

 spiral tendrils. It is useful in cultivation for screens. 



The spiral contraction of a tendril after it has caught a 

 support is in various ways of high service to the plant. 

 Sometimes it serves to lift it toward the light. Always 

 it makes the hold of the plant more elastic, and therefore 

 safer, as the hold of a ship at anchor is made safer by a 

 twisted rope than it could be by a straight wire. The 

 pretty plant-ships are struck by a gale of wind, roughly as 

 a fleet of men-of-war in the Bay of Biscay. Do they 

 founder before it ? No, they rock and roll, and the tiny 

 cables stretch, but will not break. If anything yields, it 

 will be the anchorage, not the cables. 



" When a tendril has caught a support, and is spirally 

 contracted, there are always as many turns in one direction 

 as in the other, so that the twisting of the axis in one di- 

 rection is exactly compensated by the twisting in the 

 other." — Darwin. 



Commonly there is but one change of direction in the 

 coil, and that at the centre, but whether one or as many 

 as seven or eight, always the total turns in one direction 

 are as many as in the other. 



