; while the mulberry, pineapple, and fig are examples of
compound fruits formed in various ways from a dense mass of flowers.

In all cases the seeds themselves are protected from injury by various
devices. They are small and hard in the strawberry, raspberry, currant,
etc., and are readily swallowed among the copious pulp. In the grape
they are hard and bitter; in the rose (hip) disagreeably hairy; in the
orange tribe very bitter; and all these have a smooth, glutinous
exterior which facilitates their being swallowed. When the seeds are
larger and are eatable, they are enclosed in an excessively hard and
thick covering, as in the various kinds of "stone" fruit (plums,
peaches, etc.), or in a very tough core, as in the apple. In the nutmeg
of the Eastern Archipelago we have a curious adaptation to a single
group of birds. The fruit is yellow, somewhat like an oval peach, but
firm and hardly eatable. This splits open and shows the glossy black
covering of the seed or nutmeg, over which spreads the bright scarlet
arillus or "mace," an adventitious growth of no use to the plant except
to attract attention. Large fruit pigeons pluck out this seed and
swallow it entire for the sake of the mace, while the large nutmeg
passes through their bodies and germinates; and this has led to the wide
distribution of wild nutmegs over New Guinea and the surrounding
islands.

In the restriction of bright colour to those edible fruits the eating of
which is beneficial to the plant, we see the undoubted result of natural
selection; and this is the more evident when we find that the colour
never appears till the fruit is ripe--that is, till the seeds within it
are fully matured and in the best state for germination. Some
brilliantly coloured fruits are poisonous, as in our bitter-sweet
(Solanum dulcamara), cuckoo-pint (Arum) and the West Indian manchineel.
Many of these are, no doubt, eaten by animals to whom they are harmless;
and it has been suggested that even if some animals are poisoned by them
the plant is benefited, since it not only gets dispersed, but finds, in
the decaying body of its victim, a rich manure heap.[141] The particular
colours of fruits are not, so far as we know, of any use to them other
than as regards conspicuousness, hence a tendency to _any_ decided
colour has been preserved and accumulated as serving to render the fruit
easily visible among its surroundings of leaves or herbage. Out of 134
fruit-bearing plants i