Page:Natural history of the farm.djvu/23

varieties, the best of which offer proper materials for selection.

Wild fruits, like the cultivated, fall chiefly in three categories: core fruits (pomes), stone fruits (drupes), and berries. The structural differences between pome and drupe are indicated in the accompanying diagram. The apple is the typical core fruit (pomus = apple; whence, pomology). The seeds are contained in five hardened capsules (ripened carpels), together forming the core, surrounded by the pulp or flesh of the apple, which is mostly developed from the base of the calyx. The calyx lobes persist at the apex of the apple, closed together above the withered stamens and style tips. The plum is a typical stone fruit: the single seed is enclosed in a stony covering that occupies the center of the fruit and is surrounded by the pulp. The term berry is used to cover a number of structural types which agree in little else than that they are small fruits with a number of scattered seeds embedded in the pulp.

If, with the coming of improved varieties of cultivated fruits, the wild ones have ceased to be of much importance in our diet, they still are of importance to us as food for our servants, the birds. The birds like them. Nothing will do more to attract and retain a good population of useful birds, than a plentiful supply of wild fruits through the summer season. Who that has seen orioles pecking wild strawberries or robins gormandizing on buffalo-berries or waxwings stripping a mountain ash, can

Fig. 4. Diagrams of pome fruit, (a), and stone fruit, (b)

Fig. 5. Wild chokecherry (Prunus sp?) and nannybarry (Viburnum lentago).