The Washington times., 1923-01-28
|DA|VDEL|ON CROPS
HELPED BY GOLF
Players Themselves Often Re-
sponsible for Bane of
Course Keeper.
FLUFFY HEAD INVITES BLOW
Idle Shots Scatter, Seeds and
Flowers Fill Links
Following Year.
HEAD INVITES BLOW
BY A. j. LORENz.

by A. a. LONMNZ.
Universal Service Staff Correspondent.
CHICAGO, Jan. ~. There is no
race suicide among plants. Flowers
are ambitious parents, trying by all
means to raise large families.
BOtanistS have known this for q
long time, and so have golfers, but
It has never been put into popular
language as DIR. Samuel Sinucker,
Of West Chester. Pa, did. DR..
Schumacher. who is head OF the
department Of biological sciences at
the West Chester Normal School.
Illustrated It in his talk before the
Wild Flowers Preservation Society
at the Chicago Art Institute.
The dandelion, bane OF the golf
course keepers existence, DIR.
Schumacher declared, invites the dub
to take swing at its fluffy head
in order to spread it's progeny over
the fairWay. Thus, the next season
finds, healthy crop of little baby
dandelions popuIating the course.
Tempting the idle golfer is just one
of the ,ruses, which nature adopts to
fight against the birth control
which human efforts seek to i'm
pose. He said:
Al little more prosaic ID the
| method which the butdock uses
to rear large family.
BURROUGHS TENTACLES.
The burdock burr has hundreds
Of little Lentacles that. stick tena-
ciously to ALMOST anything they
come into contact with. A COW
passing a burdock patch energies
with her tail laden with a score
or more of burrs. Wandering
over her grazing ground, the cow
switches the burrs off one by one.
In time burdocks spring up ali
over the pasture.
Very clever, / think. Plants, to
my notion, are imbued with an
intelligence that is almost un-
canny.
Edison himself, DIR. Schumacher
believes, could devise no better
plan.
There are no attractive. look
ing poisonous berries = according
to DIR. Schumacher. To prove his
,heory, the scientist eats choke
berries and the inviting fruit Of the
deadly nightshade. But he's care
full not to swallow the seeds.
Neither choke berries nor
nightshade are poisonous as some
people believe" he said. make
it g. habit Of eating some Of
every berry of this description
can find. do not eat the seed,
Of course.
Nature meant these attractive
looking berries to be eaten by
man and animal, and it meant to
have the seed scattered by being
thrown away.
Cherries. Strawberries and apples
grow lusciously red to tempt birds
to eat the fruit, according to DR..
Schumacher, while seeds are bitter
because they are to be thrown away.
Wild strawberries have adopted
the most scientific way Of natural
propagation" DIR. Schumacher con-
tinued.
The seed Of these berries is
mixed into the surface OF the
edible pulp. When the berry Is
eaten, the seed goes with it.. But
the seeds are indigestible and pass
through the digestive organs UNI
impaired. Thus the offspring OF
Mr.. and Mrs. Berry become prac-
tically unaccountable.
NATURES CURIOSITIES.
Other curiosities of nature shown
at the wild flower exhibit are the
seabean, which grows a pod eight
feet long on a vine eight hundred
feet long. Fairy. tales are more
easily believed. after viewing the
plant, which might easily be taken
as the original bean stalk which at
forded the adventures for heroic
Jack.
A homely hermit crab, decked
out in pearl, is shown among the
exhibits. The crab, it was explain
ed, had crawled into the shell OF q
heliotus, or ear-shell. then sealed
the shell with cement from its own
factory. = Years " passed-the crab
died, and now wears a mummifiad
shroud of solid pearl.
where" asks DIR. Schumacher
will Egyptologists, excavating the
tombs of the Pharaohs, find a more
gorgeous mummy? The pearl her
NIT crab (said to be the only one
of it's kind in existence) makes King
Tut -Ankhamen look like a piker.