WAYS OF NATURE 
they were poisonous. It would be interesting to 
know if anything eats the red berries of our wild 
turnip or arum. I doubt if any bird or beast could 
stand them. Wherefore, then, are they so brightly 
colored? I am also equally curious to know if any- 
thing eats the fruit of the red and white baneberry 
and the blue cohosh. 
The seeds of some wild fruit, such as the climb- 
ing bitter-sweet, are so soft that it seems impossible 
they should pass through the gizzard of a bird and 
not be destroyed. 
The fruit of the sumac comes the nearest to being 
a cheat of anything I know of in nature — a collec- 
tion of seeds covered with a flannel coat with just a 
perceptible acid taste, and all highly colored. Unless 
the seed itself is digested, what is there to tempt the 
bird to devour it, or to reward it for so doing ? 
In the tropics one sees fruits that do not become 
bright colored on ripening, such as the breadfruit, 
the custard apple, the naseberry, the mango. And 
tropical foliage never colors up as does the foliage of 
northern trees. 
VI. INSTINCT 
Many false notions seem to be current in the 
popular mind about instinct. Apparently, some of 
our writers on natural history themes would like 
to discard the word entirely. Now instinct is not 
opposed to intelligence; it is intelligence of the 
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