But it is not only birds which eat fleshy fruits and seeds. Even the tiny, industrious ant drags about seeds of certain plants. Sometimes they gather up corn or grasses, such as ant-rice, and store them for use in winter. They even bite off the growing root to prevent the seeds germinating and spoiling. Occasionally they seem to carry the seeds by accident, as, for example, those of the cow-wheat and a few others which resemble their cocoons in size, colour, and form. In other cases there is a little fleshy excrescence on the seed which they are fond of eating. Cyclamen, snowdrop, violet, and periwinkle seeds are supposed to be carried in this way. Many animals occasionally or regularly eat fruits. There are, for instance, the flying-foxes or fruit-eating bats of Madagascar and tropical countries, which may be seen hanging from the upper branches of trees by their toes, with their heads tucked away under their wings. When disturbed a little fox-like head appears, and after much chattering, scolding, and expostulation, the creature unhooks itself and flies away with a strong flight not unlike that of a crow. Horses are occasionally fed on peaches in Chile. Rats eat the coffee cherry, and do a great deal of harm in coffee plantations.
In Cashmir the mulberry and other fruit trees are sometimes visited by sportsmen, who often find bears feeding on the fruits. Pigs, of course, eat all sorts of fruit, and several other mammals do the same, but it is especially monkeys that live chiefly on fruit. They plunder the banana plantations, and in South Africa melon-patches require to be most carefully watched to prevent baboons from destroying them.
It is said that the baboons watch the plantations from a distance, and will only come down if they think no one is there: so five people walk to the patch, and while four go away again, one of them remains in hiding to shoot the baboons, who cannot tell the difference between four and five.
Man himself is, and has always been, a great eater of fruit. Not only so, but he has enormously improved and altered wild fruits until they are modified into monsters of the most extraordinary kind. The ordinary wild gooseberry weighs about 5 dwt. But even in the year 1786 some of the cultivated forms weighed double this amount (10 dwt.), and in 1852 gooseberries which weighed more than 37 dwt. were in existence. What size the largest big gooseberry may be this year is not very easy to say, because the public Press is at slack times too energetic about the question. The most usual way of improving fruits is by selecting the finest specimens for reproduction. It is by this means that the original wild banana, which is a rather small fruit with very large seeds and very little flesh, has been altered into something like 150 varieties, of which the immense majority have no seed at all. This is a very extraordinary fact, because the seed is the reason for the existence of the fruit. Of course, all such varieties must be reproduced by suckers (like the banana) or by grafts, or in some such non-sexual manner. Seedless varieties exist of the Cucumber, Fig, German Medlar, Diospyros, and Orange.
In the case of seedless varieties of the Vine, it has been found that it is necessary to carry pollen to the flowers to fertilize them, and the seedless fruit is also very much smaller in this case, not more than a quarter of the size of one that has seeds.
The following instance is typical of the manner in which many well-known kinds of fruit have been developed, though the perseverance shown by Mr. Gideon is certainly not common. About the year 1855 this gentleman began planting apple trees of about thirty named varieties. For nine years he continued his experiments. He not only planted trees, but also sowed apple seed sufficient to produce a thousand trees every year. Yet the cold winters were so severe that at the end of ten years one small seedling crab apple was the solitary survivor. One seedling of this turned out to be hardy enough for the climate of Minnesota, and this, the "wealthy" apple, has been of great importance to the Northern Mississippi growers. It is to be hoped that the name has been justified in Mr. Gideon's case.
Stereo Copyright, Underwood & UnderwoodLondon and New York
Banana Carriers in Jamaica