THE STRAWBERRY-TREE— continued. 
that of the Landes to-day, it may never have spread so far eastward as Brittany 
or Cornwall because those regions, now maritime, were then, as Paris is now, 
relatively continental. 
Theophrastus wrote of the tree, under the name Kopapos, komaros, as not 
growing to a large size, but having an edible fruit, a leaf intermediate between those 
of the Ilex and the Bay, and each blossom equalling in size and form a long Myrtle 
blossom, so that it is formed like an egg-shell cut in half. Parkinson gives an 
excellent description of the rugged red bark, the flowers “ formed like unto little 
bottles, or the flowers of Lilly convally,” and the “ rounde berrys, greene at the first, 
yellowish afterwards, and of an excellent reddish colour, and somewhat hoary withall 
being full ripe . . . like a pallide clarret Wine, of an austere taste.” 
Arbutus is one of our latest plants to flower, its loose pendulous clusters of 
creamy bells not opening till September or October. The bells are less than half an 
inch across, and within each of them ten tiny stamens spring from below the 
hypogynous honey-secreting disk. Each stamen consists of a short, stout, subulate, 
hairy filament and an anther with two awns nearly at right angles to one extremity 
and a single viscid-pointed appendage at the other. At first the filaments bend 
outwards towards the corolla, the awns hanging towards its base, whilst the viscid 
point is cemented low down on the style. A change in the direction of growth 
of the filaments then takes place, and they bend inwards as they lengthen, towards 
the central column-like style, causing the anthers to revolve through about 120° on the 
point cemented to the style, until their awns point towards the mouth of the corolla- 
tube and their blunt ends are pressed against the style. Then, while the viscid point 
has separated from the style and has been absorbed, a thin membrane closing the 
pore of the anther also disappears, so that the pollen is only kept in by the contact 
of the anther with the style. The blossoms are much visited by bees, wasps, and 
the later butterflies and moths, which, hovering beneath them to suck the honey 
clinging to the hairs on the filaments, cannot fail to touch some of the twenty awns 
radiating from the style like the spokes of a wheel, and thus tear away the anther 
from its contact with the style, so that the pollen falls upon them. 
The round five-chambered berries, which contain from twenty to twenty-five 
seeds, do not reach the orange-scarlet of ripeness till fourteen months after the fall 
of the corolla, so that the tree has the attractions of flower and fruit at the same 
time. The surface of the berry, more like the fruit of the Litchi than that of the 
Strawberry, rises into numerous points, connected with a wondrous web as of 
the clearest spun glass. 
