A7A JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 
on the outside of the succulent tissue, they are on the inside. The 
top of the stalk and the calyx together swell up and become succulent 
forming the fruit we know as the dog-hip, while what the technical 
botanist calls the fruit (or achenes) are enclosed by it. Our common 
black pine and miro belong to ihe suue order as fir-trees, but instead 
of producing their seeds in cones, each is borne on the tip of a short 
stem which swells up like a red berry when ripe. These prove very 
attractive to pigeons and other birds which eat them and thus 
disperse the seeds. In tutu (Coriaria)—a genus whose affinities are 
very imperfectly known—the petals remain attached and become 
succulent, and a similar contrivance exists in a very familiar group of 
climbers for ming a genus with a very unfamiliar name— Muhlenbeckia. 
As if however the brilliantly coloured succulent tissue did not always 
prove sufficiently attractive, some plants have added other charms. 
Thus the Nutmeg, accor ding to Wallace, bears a fruit of “the size and 
colour of a peach, ‘but rather oval. It is of a tough fleshy consistence, 
but when ripe splits open, and shows the dark-brown nut within, 
covered with the crimson mace, and is then a most beautiful object. 
.. The nuts are eaten by the large pigeons of Banda which 
digest the mace but cast up the nut with its seed uninjured.” * 
Another line of development which has been followed by a 
limited number of fruits and seeds is one in which they have acquired 
the faculty of adhering to the skin or hair of passing animals. Such 
developments are not so numerous as those previously mentioned, 
perhaps because the chances of this mode of distribution are not 
nearly so great as those in which wind or birds are the agents, yet 
some of the examples of it are sufficiently remarkable. In the Piri- 
piri (vulg. bid-a-bid), the fruit is enclosed in the persistent calyx, the 
lobes of which develope four spines at the angles, These spines of 
themselves would not be efficient clinging organs, but in several of the 
species they bear reversed barbs, the perfection of whose action is 
familiar enough to all of us. A very common genus of sedges— 
Oncinia—is equally well provided with a grappling tool, only here a 
special long bristle with a strong barb at the tip, springs from the 
base of the fruit. The stages by which this structure has been deve- 
loped are by no means clear, nor is it well understood what particular 
portion has been modified for this work. But of course New Zealand, 
a country destitute of indigenous mammalia is just about the last 
place where we should expect developments of this nature among the 
plants, and as I have pointed out elsewhere, even those plants which 
have any such specialized organs are of foreion origin or belong to 
families well represented in other lands. Were Piri-piri (Acena) and 
Uncinia confined to New Zealand, their structure would present a 
problem infinitely more difficult to solve than is the case. We must 
therefore look to other parts of the world for the best examples of 
such structural modifications as we are now considering. One of the 
most singular of these is shewn by the grapple-plant (Uncaria pro- 
cumbens) of South Africa, so called from the hooked horns on the 
fruit, by which it is enabled to cling to the fur of animals. I think it 
is Livingstone who describes the finding of a dead lion near a water- 
hole, which had died of inflammation caused by its getting a number 
of these seeds into its jaws and throat. They had originally stuck in 
* A. Wallace, ‘‘The Malay Archipelago,” p. 288. 
