Many wild animals unwillingly carry about such fruits, and after a while most of them remove what they can with claws, hoof, or teeth. Many of these plants have no familiar common names, but who has not heard of some of these? enchanter's nightshade, bedstraw, wild liquorice, hound's tongue, beggar-ticks, beggar's lice, stick-tights, pitchforks, tick-trefoil, bush clover, motherwort, sand bur, burdock, cocklebur, sanicle, Avens, Agrimony, carrot, horse nettle, buffalo bur, Russian thistle. Besides these, a very large number of small seeds and fruits are rubbed off and carried away by animals. Some of these stick by means of the pappus, as, for instance, the dandelion, thistle, prickly lettuce; others by means of hairs on the seed, such as those of the willow-herb and milkweeds and willows; or by hairs on the fruit, as virgin's bower, anemone, cotton grass, and cat-tail flag. These last named are apparently designed to be wafted by the wind, but they are ever ready to improve any other opportunity offered, whether it be by water or by clinging to passing animals.
| FIG. 60.—A fruit of tick-trefoil, Desmodium, and a few of the grappling hooks enlarged. |
| FIG. 61.—A head of the fruits of burdock. | FIG. 62.—Fruit of cocklebur. |
50. Seeds enough and to spare.—In producing seeds nature is generous, often lavish. Most seeds are eaten by animals, or fall in places where they cannot germinate and produce plants, or fall in such numbers that most of them in growing are crowded and starved to death. A very small proportion fall on good ground, and succeed in becoming fruiting plants. A large plant of purslane produces one million two hundred and fifty thousand seeds; a patch of daisy fleabane, three thousand seeds to each square inch of space covered by a plant. The genuine student will not be satisfied till he has selected several different kinds of plants and counted, or estimated, the number of seeds produced by each, or the number of seeds furnished to the area covered by one or by several plants.
CHAPTER VIII.
MAN DISPERSES SEEDS AND PLANTS.
In describing the various means by which plants are dispersed, people are very likely not to mention the aid supplied by man, or to speak of his efforts as artificial or unnatural, forgetting for the time that man so far appears to be the crown of earthly existence, and that his works are a necessary part of a complete world.
51. Burs stick to clothing.—Late in summer or in autumn, who is there who has not returned from a walk along the river or from a tramp through thickets or the open woods, to find large numbers of half a dozen kinds of seed-like fruits sticking to his clothes? When ripe, these fruits usually separate from the parent plant very easily, by a joint or brittle place well provided for in the early part of the season. In pursuing your way you rub off a portion of these fruits, and at the end of the journey, or before, you sit down in some comfortable spot and deliberately pick off the unwelcome stick-tights. At such times you have been the means of transporting seeds, and you have left them scattered about ready to grow. If you ever were so fortunate as to live on a farm, you must have seen your father or his hired help carefully look about the field or the wood lot and remove all the bur-bearing plants that could be found before turning in his flock of sheep or the colts and cattle; for if this were not done, he knows that hair and mane will surely be disfigured, and that the wool will be rendered unsalable. In removing the weeds he defeated the plans of Nature in her devices for sowing seeds.