Winged Seeds

The usual way for seeds to be carried is by the wind. Sometimes they are so small and light as to be easily wafted by the breezes. This is the case with the seed of the moccasin-flowers and meadow-pinks, and the other beautiful plants of our woods and bogs called orcliids. And the tinybodies like atoms of dust, termed "spores," that answer to seed in ferns and mosses and toadstools, are borne away by the lightest breath of air. But most of the seeds are themselves too heavy for this. So they are offtimes provided with thin broad wings that carry them before the wind as a sail carries a boat. The pair of "keys" that hang in clusters froin the maple-trees in spring are sucb. winged iruits. When ripe they float slowly to the ground, or if a high wind is blovving, they are carried farther from the tree. The ash has thick bunches of winged fruitsmuch like these, but single. The elin has thin, papery border all around its small seeds, which makes them quite conspicuous as they hang on the branches before the leaves have come out. Numbers of plants have about the seeds delicate hairs or bristles that take the place of wings. A dandelion "clock," or a head of thistle-down, is a buncli of seeds, each with a circle of fine bristles on the summit. When the seeds are ripe, along comes a breeze, and puff! away go the seeds, hanging from their tufts of bristles, as the basket hangs from the balloon. The bunches of long silky hairs that come from a bursting pod of milkweed, and flll the air around, have each there preciou8 cargo in the shape of a small, brown seed. The seeds that ripen in heads on the clematis, after the liandsome purple tiower leaves have fallen, have long featliered tails, like slender bird-plumes, that lo the same work that is given to the silk of mükweed. The "cotton" around the seeds of the willows at the riverside and of the poplars along city streets serves the same useful purpose. Cotton its self is only a bunch of ftne white hair around the seed. Ages before men thougbt of spinning it, and weaving it into cloth, it was making itseif useful to the eotton-plant by helping to scatter its seeds. - Thomas H. Kearney, jr., in St. Nicbolas.