THEIK STRUCTURE AND MIGRATIONS. 
21 
Then there are many fruits which are provided with a feathery 
attachment which the wind catches and thus blows them about 
from place to place, in fact most of the plants which belong to the 
Composite are provided with this hairy structure. In the wild 
clematis ( C. Vitalba ) the carpels possess a very beautiful feathery 
down. The Pasque flower (Anemone pulsatilld), which may be 
found growing at Easter time on some of the chalky downs in the 
north of our county, is of a purple colour, and when it dies off a 
feathery fruit is developed. The plant is a low one and being 
hidden in the grass the fruit would stand a poor chance of being- 
blown about by the wind, but between the periods when the flower 
dies away and the seeds attain maturity the flower-stalk grows, 
lifting the fruit right away from the involucre of green leaves 
which enveloped the flower, and so giving it a better chance of 
catching the passing breeze. Then again in several of our trees the 
seeds develop a wing-like appendage which bears them up and 
they are blown long distances. 
Many plants develop hooks by which their fruits are carried away 
in the fur of animals. The involucre of the burdock and the calyx 
of the forget-me-not furnish familiar examples. 
Minute appendages are often possessed by seeds, enabling them 
to penetrate through grass and other compact herbage, and so reach 
the soil in which they will often by the same means bury them¬ 
selves. The tiny barbs with which many fruits are clothed are 
enabled to propel them forward in the same way as an ear of barley 
or other aristate grain will, if placed in the sleeve, work its way, 
by the motion of the arm, to the shoulder. In the Graminacese the 
fruits are for the most part spindle-shaped, and are thus well fitted 
to penetrate a resisting medium. This is the reason why the floor 
of a hay-loft is generally covered with seeds which have worked 
their way through the superincumbent mass of dried herbage. 
The three most common aids to penetration possessed by fruits are 
an awn-like appendage, a barbed or scabrid surface, and a fusi¬ 
form shape. 
In a paper recently read before the Natural History Society of 
Glasgow,^ the Rev. A. S. Wilson, B.A., B.Sc., pointed out that 
the transport of aristate grain may also be indirectly brought about 
by the action of the wind. Suppose a grain of barley to fall on a 
waving field of its own species. If the crop is close the seed will 
float almost as if on water, and, in consequence of its barbed awn, 
be borne along, worked by waves, as it were, towards the margin 
or thinner portions of the field. The movements of the barley 
acting on the barbs of the awn, when it once begins to descend, 
will cause the seed to force a passage to the soil, into which it may 
even penetrate some little distance by the same kind of action. 
The colouring, too, of fruits is not without significance. A fruit 
like the cherry or plum, that is green when immature, becomes 
brightly coloured and attractive when ripe, and so is likely to catch 
* “ The Dispersion of Seeds and Spores,” ‘ Trans. Nat. Hist. Society of 
Glasgow,’ N.S., yoI. iii, p. 83. 
