and shrubs which have
adhered to his smoking flanks are washed off again by the waters. The
thorny spray is torn off, and fixes itself in its hairy coat, until
brushed off again in other thickets and copses. Even on the spot where
the victim is devoured many of the seeds which he had swallowed
immediately before the chase may be left on the ground uninjured, and
ready to spring up in a new soil.

The passage, indeed, of undigested seeds through the stomachs of animals
is one of the most efficient causes of the dissemination of plants, and
is of all others, perhaps, the most likely to be overlooked. Few are
ignorant that a portion of the oats eaten by a horse preserve their
germinating faculty in the dung. The fact of their being still
nutritious is not lost on the sagacious rook. To many, says Linnaeus, it
seems extraordinary, and something of a prodigy, that when a field is
well tilled and sown with the best wheat, it frequently produces darnel
or the wild oat, especially if it be manured with new dung; they do not
consider that the fertility of the smaller seeds is not destroyed in the
stomachs of animals.[860]

_Agency of birds._--Some birds of the order Passeres devour the seeds of
plants in great quantities, which they eject again in very distant
places, without destroying its faculty of vegetation: thus a flight of
larks will fill the cleanest field with a great quantity of various
kinds of plants, as the melilot trefoil (_Medicago lupulina_), and
others whose seeds are so heavy that the wind is not able to scatter
them to any distance.[861] In like manner, the blackbird and
misselthrush, when they devour berries in too great quantities, are
known to consign them to the earth undigested in their excrement.[862]

Pulpy fruits serve quadrupeds and birds as food, while their seeds,
often hard and indigestible, pass uninjured through the intestines, and
are deposited far from their original place of growth in a condition
peculiarly fit for vegetation.[863] So well are the farmers, in some
parts of England, aware of this fact, that when they desire to raise a
quickset hedge in the shortest possible time, they feed turkeys with the
haws of the common white-thorn (_Crataegus Oxyacantha_), and then sow the
stones which are ejected in their excrement, whereby they gain an entire
year in the growth of the plant.[864] Birds, when they pluck cherries,
sloes, and haws, fly away with them to some convenient place; and when