YALUE OF CHARACTERS. 849 
volving upon it as a portion of the female organ—the receiving 
the pollen and conveying it to the ovary. These styles of the 
female florets are uniformly divided into two equal more or less 
stigmatie branches, glabrous without and papillose inside, which 
may occasionally vary in length or thickness, but only slightly so, 
and very rarely, as far as I have been able to observe, so as to 
give any but a very slight generic clue. It is the style of the 
hermaphrodite florets, in its usually principal and often sole 
function of sweeping the pollen out of the antheral tube, that 
presents those external differences which by Lessing and De 
Candolle have been taken as absolute tribual characters, and 
which are in fact, generally speaking, important and useful, but 
which are also liable to numerous exceptions. As an instance of 
the confusion resulting from the use made of this character, I may 
point out that in the illustrations of the styles of eight of the 
principal tribes given in Lindley's ‘ Vegetable Kingdom,’ p. 703, 
two (n. 2 and 3) have not the forms characteristic of the tribes 
they represent, and, indeed, are taken from genera which, although 
included by De Candolle in Eupatoriaces and Asteroidew respec- 
tively, have been erroneously there placed, whilst three others 
(n. 5, 6, and 7) are far from being typical of the majority of their 
cotribuals. 
Referring to the diagrams which I have here given, Plate X., 
there is no doubt that the styles of the large genera Vernonia 
(fig. 2), Eupatorium (fig. 3), Aster (fig. 4), Senecio (fig. 6), and 
Carduus (fig. 8) are prevalent also in a considerable number of 
genera closely connected with them on other accounts ; but, on the 
other hand, some of these forms are to be met with in genera 
naturally far removed from them, or are not in closely allied genera, 
or, again, are so connected with each other by intermediate forms 
as to render them in some cases useless even as artificial characters. 
The Vernonia style (fig. 2), with its long, slender, almost acute 
branches, nearly equally hirsute throughout, with the stigmatic 
series scarcely prominent on the inner surface towards the base, 
is, I believe, constant in the 35 genera and near 500 species of 
the tribe; but it is also to be met with in a few genera which 
on every other account must be placed either in Asteroidee 
(e. g. Chrysopsis), in Inuloidex, or in Senecionidez (e. g. Liabum 
and Gynura). The Eupatorium style (fig. 3), with long, obtuse 
or club-shaped branches only minutely papillose instead of 
being hirsute, but with the slightly conspicuous stigmatic series of 
