“Oh, the doleful countries!” cried Emile. “One more question, Uncle. In traveling around the sun does the earth go fast?”

“If I am not mistaken,” said Jean, “it is what we call fox-glove. It is common on the edges of woods.”

The double bag that surmounts the stamen is called an anther.

“I will tell you now how we know that the falling of the pollen on to the stigma is indispensable to the development of the ovary into fruit.

Flies, wasps, honey-bees, bumble-bees, beetles, butterflies, all vie with one another in rendering aid by carrying the pollen of the stamens to the stigmas.

“Of all poisonous plants, my friends,” he began, “mushrooms are the most formidable; and yet some furnish a delightful food capable of tempting the soberest.”

A mushroom is in its way the blossom of a kind of vegetable, but its structure has nothing in common with that of ordinary flowers.

The truffle is the most important of eatable mushrooms.

“The number of persons who perished in these terrible circumstances is estimated at eighty thousand.

“Those charcoal-burners were not at all such bad people as I thought at first,” said Jules.

“In the hottest countries, Senegal, for example, the temperature rises to 45 and 50 degrees. It is twice as hot as our summer.”

“The interior of the earth is, then, really a stove?” queried Jules.

“Then the snail’s house is a shell, the same as the beautiful ones you have shown us,” Jules observed.

“I have noticed that if you bring anything near the snail’s long horns, the animal draws them in.”

“Every one has his portion in this world. The slimy animal has for his a splendid palace of mother-of-pearl.”

“If the crab brook comes from the sea,” interposed Emile, “as you say, its water ought to be salt; but I know very well it is not, in the least.”

“You say the wax-bees make wax. I thought they found it ready-made in flowers.”

One comb is not enough when the population is numerous; others are constructed like the first.

Flowers do not last all the year, and, moreover, there are days of rest, rainy days when the bees cannot go out.

“The bees are very naughty to force the queens to kill one another until there is only one left,” commented Emile.