YALUE OF CHARACTERS. 351 
undivided or with slender erect branches, very papillose or hirsute 
outside, without stigmatic series inside, and very similar in all the 
different tribes where they occur. The Cichoriaceous style (fig. 1), 
with slender, almost filiform, papillose branches, varying but 
slightly in being more or less acute or obtuse, and very rarely some- 
what shortened and flattened, is uniform in the tribe, but is also 
precisely the one most general in the female florets of the order. 
To recapitulate, the style-branches of the hermaphrodite florets 
afford one of the most useful characters for the determination of 
genera and some tribes; but all attempts to take it as absolute have 
hitherto miserably failed, and it must always be considered in 
combination with other characters. 
An increase in the number of style-branches from two to three 
has been occasionally observed, but appears never to be even of 
specific importance ; for I have met with it in genera otherwise far 
removed from each other, and never found it to be constant in all 
the flowers of the same specimen. 
The epigynous disk has been much made use of for the distinc- 
tion of genera, by a few botanists who have specially studied a small 
number of Composite forms. When present it varies much in 
form : generally speaking, it is a fleshy or glandular, thick, annular 
projection round the base of the style, either free from it or more 
orless connected with it, and passing, as it were, into a bulbiform 
base to the style itself, besides other modifications. In some Cen- 
taurec,for instance, it forms a membranous or paleaceous 5-toothed 
cup or tube, having the appearance of an inner pappus; in many 
genera there is no trace of it. I had formerly, in concurrence 
with Steetz, Schultz Bipontinus, and others, thought that these 
differences might be useful at least for generic distinction; but 
when I came to observe it in several large natural genera, I found 
it so variable, that I felt compelled to omit it from the generic 
characters whilst unable to verify it in every species. Delpino 
connects the presence or absence of the epigynous disk with the 
entomophilous or anemophilous character of the fertilization ; and 
he may be right, although the observations hitherto made are far 
too few to assume such to be the case; and even if it be so, the 
character seems of comparatively inferior systematic value, ento- 
mophilous and anemophilous fertilization occurring sometimes, in 
Composite as in other orders, in plants otherwise closely allied—as 
well stated by Delpino in the above-quoted pamphlet, p. 34, 
almost in contradiction to the generic and even tribual importance 
he attaches to the character in the same memoir. 
LINN. JOURN.—BOTANY, VOL. XIII. 2D 
