THE ARTICULATE WING.
The articulate wing can be removed from the nut and can be replaced without injury. An ineffective form of this wing is seen in the Gerardianae and in P. pinea, where the blade is very short and the base has no effective grasp on the nut.
The base of the effective articulate wing contains hygroscopic tissue which acts with the hygroscopic tissue of the cone-scales. The dry conditions that open the cone and release the seeds cause the bifurcate base of the wing to grasp the nut more firmly.
This articulate wing is found in P. aristata and in all Hard Pines except P. pinea, longifolia and canariensis. The wing-blade is usually membranous throughout, but in some species there is a thickening of the base of the blade that meets the membranous apical part in an oblique line along which the wing is easily broken apart. This last condition attains in P. Coulteri and its associates a remarkable development.
[Plate VI], fig. 72 shows the wingless seed of P. cembroides; fig. 73 represents the seed of P. flexilis, with a rudimentary wing; fig. 74 shows two seeds of P. strobus, intact and with the wing broken away; fig. 75 represents the articulate wing, whose bifurcate base when wet (fig. 76) tends to open and release the nut. When dry (fig. 77) the forks of the base, in the absence of the nut, close together and cross their tips; figs. 78, 79 show the peculiar reinforced articulate wing of P. Coulteri.
Such wide variation in so important an organ suggests generic difference. But here we are met by the association of the different forms in species evidently closely allied. The two Foxtail Pines are so similar in most characters that they have been considered, with good reason, to be specifically identical; yet the seed-wing of P. Balfouriana is adnate, that of P. aristata articulate. P. Ayacahuite produces not only the characteristic wing of the Strobi, adnate, long and effective, but also, in the northern variety, a seed with a rudimentary wing, the exact counterpart of the seed of P. flexilis. In both sections of the genus are found the effective adnate wing (Strobi and Longifoliae) and the inefficient articulate wing (Gerardianae and Pineae). A little examination of all forms of the seed will show that they blend gradually one into another.
The color of the wing is occasionally peculiar, as in the group Longifoliae. There is usually no constancy in this character, for the wing may be uniform in color or variously striated in seeds of the same species. The length and breadth of the seed-wing, being dependent on the varying sizes of the cone-scale, differ in the same cone. They are also inconstant in different cones of the same species, and of this inconstancy the seed of P. ayacahuite furnishes the most notable example.
