CHAPTER VII 

 THE MORPHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY OF FRUITS 



1. The Distinctive Characteristics of Fruits 



The word fruit has far wider significance in scientific than 

 in popular language, for to the botanist it includes any 

 structure which has part in the development of seeds, no 

 matter whether edible or not, or what the aspect it presents. 



Most fruits are the ripened ovaries of flowers, from which 

 all other parts (excepting of course the receptacle) have 

 faUen away, though occasionally some of the other floral 

 parts persist, and become incorporated with the ripening 

 ovary. There are fruits, however, which have no connection 

 with ovaries, as in berries of Yews and cones of Pines, though 

 in such cases other structures replace the ovaries in function. 



The ovary, as a rule, "withers and falls with the other parts 

 of the flower unless pollination occurs ; but after pollination 

 the ovary develops to a fruit, the ovule to a seed, and the 

 fertihzed egg cell to an embryo. Thus pollination acts as 

 the stimulus to fruit formation, the arrangement being 

 obviously advantageous in preventing the waste of good food 

 material upon fruit and seed if no embryo is formed to be 

 protected and disseminated, — and no embryo is formed 

 without fertilization. 



Fruits displajf well-nigh as great a diversitj^ in their visible 

 features as do the other plant organs. They fall rather 

 naturally, however, into two great classes, — dry fruits, like 

 pods, and fleshy or edible fruits, like berries. 



In size, fruits are almost microscopic in some very small 

 plants, and vary thence upward to the great double Coco- 



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