the pumpkin, and the vegetable-marrow, almost all of which
are edible and in every way fruit-like. Among English weeds, the little
bittercress that grows on dry walls and hedge-banks forms an excellent
example of the same device. Village children love to touch the long,
ripe, brown capsules on the top with one timid finger, and then jump
away, half laughing, half terrified, when the mild-looking little plant
goes off suddenly with a small bang and shoots its grains like a
catapult point-blank in their faces.

It is in the tropics, however, that these elastic fruits reach their
highest development. There they have to fight, not merely against such
small fry as robins, squirrels, and harvest-mice, but against the
aggressive parrot, the hard-billed toucan, the persistent lemur, and
the inquisitive monkey. Moreover, the elastic fruits of the tropics
grow often on spreading forest trees, and must therefore shed their
seeds to immense distances if they are to reach comparatively virgin
soil, unexhausted by the deep-set roots of the mother trunk. Under such
exceptional circumstances, the tropical examples of these elastic
capsules are by no means mere toys to be lightly played with by babes
and sucklings. The sand-box tree of the West Indies has large round
fruits, containing seeds about as big as an English horsebean; and the
capsule explodes, when ripe, with a detonation like a pistol,
scattering its contents with as much violence as a shot from an
air-gun. It is dangerous to go too near these natural batteries during
the shooting season. A blow in the eye from one would blind a man
instantly. I well remember the very first night I spent in my own house
in Jamaica, where I went to live shortly after the repression of
'Governor Eyre's rebellion,' as everybody calls it locally. All night
long I heard somebody, as I thought, practising with a revolver in my
own back garden: a sound which somewhat alarmed me under those very
unstable social conditions. An earthquake about midnight, it is true,
diverted my attention temporarily from the recurring shots, but didn't
produce the slightest effect upon the supposed rebel's devotion to the
improvement of his marksmanship. When morning dawned, however, I found
it was only a sand-box tree, and that the shots were nothing more than
the explosions of the capsules. As to the wonderful tales told about
the Brazilian cannon-ball tree, I cannot personally endorse them from
original observatio