40. Color, odor, and pleasant taste of fruits are advertisements.--In summer, buds are formed on bushes of black raspberry, blossoms appear, and these are followed by small, green, and bitter berries, which hardly anything cares to eat. They grow slowly, become soft and pulpy, and finally good to eat. How is bird or boy or girl to know where they are and when they are fit to eat? The plant has enterprise and has displayed two want advertisements by painting the berries first dark red, and then dark purple, when they are good to eat. But is the plant made expressly to produce berries, just to feed birds and children? If that be all, why are seeds formed in the berries in such large numbers? No! They produce berries that contain seeds, and from these seeds are to grow more bushes. Then why should not the berries always remain bitter or hard, so that nothing would touch them? If we may say so, the plant produces sweet and showy berries on purpose to be eaten, that the seeds may be carried away. What becomes of the seeds? Each one is enclosed in a hard, tough covering, which protects it from destruction in the stomachs of many birds and some other animals. The seeds are well distributed by the animals that eat the berries. The brilliant colors of ripe berries say to bird and child: "Here we are; eat us, for we are good." The sweet pulp pays the birds for distributing the seeds, else they would not be so distributed. The seeds are as well provided for locomotion as the ticks, the mites, and the spiders, and when ready to go, the berries flaunt their colors to attract attention. You see, then, that although the old parent bush cannot change its place, young bushes grow from the tips of the branches, and seedlings spring up at long distances from their old homes. [Illustration: FIG. 50.--Raspberry, ripened, picked, and ready to be eaten.] Sparrows, finches, and similar birds in the winter eat and destroy seeds of grasses and weeds, while the same birds in summer and autumn eat bushels of blueberries, huckleberries, elderberries, raspberries, strawberries, and similar fruits, and distribute their unharmed seeds over thousands of acres, which otherwise might never support a growth of these species. The downy woodpecker, among other things, devours berries of three kinds of dogwood, Virginia creeper, service berry, strawberry, pokeberry, poison ivy, poison sumac, stag-horn sumac, and blue beech. The hairy woodpecker devours many of the above fruits, as well as those of spicebush, sour gum, cherries, grapes, blackberries. The flicker devours most of the fruits listed for the two woodpeckers named above, also hackberry, black alder, green brier, bayberries. A number of other woodpeckers possess habits much the same as the three above named. The cedar bird devours many species of hard-seeded fruits.