Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/326

312 can attach, themselves. It is curious and interesting to watch them as they grow, and to see how closely their movements simulate intelligent action. The little curled whorls go feeling about on every side for a suitable foothold, groping blindly, as it were, in search of a support, and revolving slowly in wide-sweeping curves, until at last they happen to lay hold with their growing end of a proper object. Once found, they seem to seize it eagerly with their little fingers (for in the gourd the tendrils are branched, not simple), and to wrap it round at once many times over in their tight embrace. It is wonderful how far they will go up out of their way in their groping quest of a proper foothold, and how, when at length they stumble upon it, they will look for all the world as if they had known beforehand exactly when and where to search for it. These actions come far closer to intelligence than most people imagine; they are deliberately performed in responsive answer to external stimuli, and only take place when the right conditions combine to excite them.

Your young gourd, then, once it grows from the seed, begins from the very first to look about for a neighboring bush up which it may climb to reach the sun and air that it could never get at on the ground beneath, or approach by its own unaided efforts. In this respect it is one of the most advanced and highly developed members of its own family. Its humbler ally, the squirting cucumber of the Mediterranean shores (a quaint little creature about which I shall have more to say hereafter), remains to this day a mere lowly trailer, unprovided with tendrils or other means of climbing, and therefore necessarily confined to open, waste places, where alone it can hope to procure its fair share of air and sunlight. In the true cucumber, on the other hand, and the bryony of our English hedges and waysides, there are climbing tendrils, but they are simple and unbranched. In the gourd itself, however, a plant of Indian origin, accustomed to the rough, wild scrub of the tropics, the tendrils are forked, so as to aid the plant in climbing rapidly over the thick and tangled vegetation of its native jungles. The ample leaves then spread themselves out broadly in the full sunshine, mantling their unwilling host with their luscious green, and choking it slowly out by shutting off from its foliage all the life-giving rays and carbon laden air.

All annuals flower as soon as they have laid by sufficient material for producing their blossoms. The flowers of the gourds, however, like those of their allies the melons and cucumbers, present one very curious peculiarity. In all these plants, the sexes are distinct; and, in most of them, the male and female flowers are borne on totally different plants. The reason for this arrangement is no doubt to be found in the common necessity for