THE MEADOW CRANE’S-BILL— continued. 
Botanists have had to ransack Aristophanes’s “ Birds ” for the names of long- 
billed birds — cranes, storks, and herons — for the genera which have these fruits. 
The beak consists of a prolongation of the axis or carpophore in which the styles are 
incorporated, and from the sides of which strips of tissue, forming the awns of the 
ripe carpels, separate themselves elastically in the bursting of the fruit. 
The genus Geranium , named in ancient times from the Greek yepavos, geranos, 
a crane, and thus rightly translated Crane’s-bill, includes some 1 60 species, natives of 
Temperate, and mainly of Northern, regions, of which about a dozen are numbered 
among British plants. While their five sepals are imbricate, so that two of them 
have both margins free, two have both margins covered and one has one margin free 
and the other overlapped, the five petals are contorted in aestivation, i.e. each has one 
margin overlapping an edge of the next. The five honey-glands are opposite the 
sepals : the ten stamens all bear anthers, the outer row ripening them before the 
inner whorl does so ; and the five carpels maturing their stigmas at least later than 
the outer anthers. The straight outer lignified strands in the beak are denser and 
contract more in ripening than does the subjacent tissue ; with the result that a 
state of tension is set up, and ultimately these strands burst off, curling outwards 
from below upwards, but sometimes remaining attached to the central axis at their 
apices, and each carry away a carpel, which contains a single seed, although in the 
earlier stage there are two ovules to each carpel. 
In the beautiful Meadow Crane’s-bill ( Geranium pratense Linne), which adorns 
our river-banks and water-meadows, and even occurs in fairly dry hedgerows in the 
west of England, the deeply-lobed leaves so much resemble those of the Buttercups 
that it has been called Crowfoot Crane’s-bill; but Gerard’s translation of the Latin 
name Gratia Dei, then in use in Germany, as Grace of God, does not seem to have 
popularised it here. The large violet-blue flowers, protected from honey-robbers 
by glandular reflexed hairs over most of the plant and a fringe of hairs on the claws 
of the petals, are visited by a variety of flying insects ; and, as all the anthers burst 
before the stigmas become receptive, the plant is entirely dependent on cross- 
pollination by their means. As the awns spring away from the central axis of the 
fruit, the carpels split along their inner surfaces which the coiling of the awn has 
brought into an upward position, so that the seed is jerked out of the carpel to a 
distance. The surface of the seed is covered with a network of ridges which may 
serve to anchor it where it falls. 
