Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/330

316 if I may venture so to describe it, is the skunk among vegetables. Its object in life, its sole aim and desire, is to deter animals from eating its fruit and seeds; and therefore it makes itself as unpleasant and as inconspicuous as it possibly can. It is green, so that animals may not readily detect its presence among its leaves; it is spine-clad, so that they may not attack it with their tender noses; it is nasty to the taste and disagreeable to the smell, so that they may avoid its neighborhood when once they have learned to know its personal peculiarities. If a goat or a donkey, wandering among the scrub, chances to touch the long, trailing branches, the cucumber squirts out its juice in his eyes, and at the same time sows its seeds all round on a spot where no hostile creature is likely to interfere with them. We have here in a very extreme form a specimen of that rare type of succulent fruit which does not lay itself out at all to attract the attention of friendly animals, but, on the contrary, endeavors energetically to repel them.

The mass of the gourd-kind, however, pursue the exactly opposite tactics. They have learned by experience to imitate rather a policy of conciliation, and to turn the birds, quadrupeds, and fruit-eating animals generally in their environment from deadly foes into friendly disseminators. For this purpose, their fruits, when ripe and fit for seeding, become red, yellow, pink, or orange, though they only assume these brilliant hues at the exact moment when the seeds are ready to be severed from the parent stem and dispersed for germination. Till that time, they remain green and sour, or at least tasteless. The seeds in these cases are surrounded by a soft, sweet* pulp, especially noticeable in the melon and the watermelon; and this pulp the plant gives in, so to speak, as an inducement to animals to disseminate its seeds over the surrounding country. It has learned organically the value of rotation of crops. It desires fresh soil in which to expand. The actual seeds themselves, however, are not sweet; they are inclosed in a hard and somewhat horny or leathery shell; and they are seldom eaten and still seldomer digested by birds or animals, owing to their tough and slippery surfaces. We have here, then, the very same inducements of food, sweetness, perfume, and color expended by the plant upon its fruit for the sake of its seeds that we saw before expended upon the flower for the sake of obtaining cross-fertilization by the aid of insects.

At the same time, it is interesting to note that almost all the gourd family possess in some part or other of their economy certain bitter, nauseating, medicinal principles, expressly intended to deter animals from meddling with or eating them. But these bitter principles are variously distributed in the leaves, stems, stock, or fruit, according to the special type of dangers to which the