How do you suppose North American crane’s bills came to be like South African pelargoniums? This is a matter which needs investigating. The pelargoniums are not as juicy as the nasturtiums, but they are somewhat juicy, and their juice has a slightly acid taste instead of being pungent, like the nasturtium juice. Where pelargoniums live out of doors the year round they grow very large and have stems that are quite woody. Some of them, as we know, are useful to the human race as well as ornamental, supplying food and an oil highly esteemed as a perfume. The wood sorrels do not look much like the rest of the Geranium Family. But they do resemble it in their habit of caring for their seeds. Out in the fields you will find the small, yellow-flowered sheep sorrel, with its clover-like, sour-tasting leaves. Now hunt for a seed-pod. They are pretty little things that stand up something like Christmas candles. Touch a ripe one and it splits open down each of its five cells and shows you a row of white seeds in each. You think the seeds are not ripe because they are white, and you touch one of them. What has happened? That seed surely exploded! No, there it is—the other side of the table, not white, but dark brown. Queer performance, this. You touch another and another, and at last you get to understand it. Each seed is surrounded by an elastic white covering, and this it is that suddenly curls up, very much as the impatiens pod does, and sends the seed within it flying! [Illustration: [Pelargonium]] When night comes the sorrel goes to sleep. Its leaflets droop and shut together as you see in the picture, and the flowers, too, close. The sorrel loves the sunshine, and often does not open on cloudy days. There are a great many sorrels in the world besides our sheep sorrel; in fact, we are told there are about two hundred and five of them! We have only three or four out of all that number, and they are not all yellow like the sheep sorrel. One that lives in the cool Northern woods is white, with delicate pink veins. Pretty little things they are, and farther South there lives a pretty violet one. Like the pelargoniums, the sorrels are to be found at the Cape of Good Hope. In fact, most of the two hundred and five kinds live there and in South America. Like the pelargoniums, too, the South African sorrels are much larger and brighter than their American relatives. We like them so well we raise them in our greenhouses and window boxes. They are much larger than our wild sorrels and have bright pink or white or yellow corollas. Down in Peru, too, there grows a very useful sorrel; they call it “oca,” and raise it for its potatolike tubers which the people eat. The Mexicans also have a sorrel with edible bulbs and bright red flowers. In fact, the sorrel, like the potato, has a habit of storing up plenty of underground food which is also good food for man, and several species of sorrel are raised for this purpose in different parts of the world.