ers, because they can't drop off of themselves without the aid
of birds, while the birds are too well supplied with other food to care
for them. One of the strangest cases of all, however, is that of the
mistletoe, which, living parasitically upon the forest-boughs and
apple-trees, would of course be utterly lost if its berries dropped
their seeds on to the ground beneath it. To avoid such a misfortune,
the mistletoe berries are filled with an exceedingly viscid and sticky
pulp, surrounding the hard little nut-like seeds: and this pulp makes
the seeds cling to the bills and feet of various birds which feed upon
the fruit, but most particularly of the missel thrush, who derives his
common English name from his devotion to the mistletoe. The birds then
carry them away unwittingly to some neighbouring tree, and rub them
off, when they get uncomfortable, against a forked branch--the exact
spots that best suits the young mistletoe for sprouting in. Man, in
turn, makes use of the sticky pulp for the manufacture of bird-lime,
and so employs against the birds the very qualities which the plant
intended as a bribe for their kindly services.

Among seeds that trust for their disposal to the wind, the commonest,
simplest, and least evolved type is that of the ordinary capsule, as in
the poppies and campions. At first sight, to be sure, a casual observer
might suppose there existed in these cases no recognisable device at
all for the dissemination of the seedlings. But you and I, most
excellent and discreet reader, are emphatically _not_, of course, mere
casual observers. _We_ look close, and go to the very root of things.
And when we do so, we see for ourselves at once that almost all
capsules open--where? why, at the top, so that the seeds can only be
shaken out when there is a high enough wind blowing to sway the stems
to and fro with some violence, and scatter the small black grains
inside to a considerable distance. Furthermore, in many instances, of
which the common poppy-head is an excellent example, the capsule opens
by lateral pores at the top of a flat head--a further precaution which
allows the seeds to get out only by a few at a time, after a distinct
jerk, and so scatters them pretty evenly, with different winds, over a
wide circular space around the mother plant. Experiment will show how
this simple dodge works. Try to shake out the poppy-seed from a ripe
poppy-head on the plant as it grows, without breaking the stem o