A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga: The Yoga of WisdomAtkinson, William Walker
Religion
A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga: The Yoga of Wisdom
Atkinson, William Walker
Yoga, Jñana
Other plants, like the thistle, provide their seed with downy wings, by
which the wind carries them afar to other fields. Other seeds have a
faculty of tumbling and rolling along the ground to great distances,
owing to their peculiar shape and formation. The maple provides its
seed with a peculiar arrangement something like a propeller screw,
which when the wind strikes the trees and looses the seed, whirls the
latter through the air to a distance of a hundred yards or more. Other
seeds are provided with floating apparatus, which enables them to
travel many miles by stream or river, or rain washes. Some of these not
only float, but actually swim, having spider-like filaments, which
wriggle like legs, and actually propel the tiny seed along to its new
home. A recent writer says of these seeds that "so curiously lifelike
are their movements that it is almost impossible to believe that these
tiny objects, making good progress through the water, are really seeds,
and not insects."
The leaves of the Venus' Fly-trap fold upon each other and enclose the
insect which is attracted by the sweet juice on the leaf, three
extremely sensitive bristles or hairs giving the plant notice that the
insect is touching them. A recent writer gives the following
description of a peculiar plant. He says: "On the shores of Lake
Nicaragua is to be found an uncanny product of the vegetable kingdom
known among the natives by the expressive name of 'the Devil's Noose.'
Dunstan, the naturalist, discovered it long ago while wandering on the
shores of the lake. Attracted by the cries of pain and terror from his
dog, he found the animal held by black sticky bands which had chafed
the skin to bleeding point. These bands were branches of a
newly-discovered carnivorous plant which had been aptly named the 'land
octopus.' The branches are flexible, black, polished and without
leaves, and secrete a viscid fluid."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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