384. MR. G. BENTHAM ON COMPOSITA. 
great majority, but strictly opposite in a few genera, entire or 
variously toothed or divided. The indumentum is usually cottony 
and whitish or soft, sometimes glutinous, rarely coarsely hirsute, 
in one genus stellate. The involuere very generally consists 
of a single or almost simple inner row of equal, more or less 
herbaceous or membranous, rarely almost fleshy, bracts, united 
or free, with or without more or less of smaller outer ones, com- 
monly called a calyculus; in a few genera, however, they gradu- 
ally increase from the outer to the inner ones; they are never 
pungent, and rarely appendiculate. The capitula are usually hete- 
rogamous; the female florets in a single row almost always fertile ; 
the disk-florets fertile in most genera, but all, or mostly, sterile in 
some others ; and in a few genera, and several species of others, the 
female florets are deficient, leaving the capitula homogamous. The 
receptacle is usually without pale: ; these, however, are present, 
subtending the florets and usually deciduous, in two small genera 
(one of them monotypic). The corollas of the female florets are 
usually ligulate, with a trimerous spreading lamina, entire or 
toothed, the two inner lobes entirely wanting, or rarely present 
in the shape of one or two fine teeth or short filiform lobes ; 
the disk-florets regular, with five, or rarely four, short lobes or 
teeth, the latter yellow or rarely white or purple; the ray-florets 
homochromous or, in a few species only, heterochromous. The 
anthers have the normal terminal appendage, and are usually 
sagittate at the base, with the auricles usually aeute and some- 
times produced into small points, but never into the hair-like 
tails of most Inuloidew. The ordinary form of the style-branches of 
the disk-florets is with dilated truncate penicillate tips, as in 
Anthemidex ; but these in some genera bear obtuse or acute ter- 
minal appendages, hairy, as in Asteroidez, but perhaps rather less 
flattened, and therefore called cones, and their hairs usually shorter 
than those which surround the base of these appendages ; but in a 
few cases the styles pass into those of Asteroidew, and in others 
the branches are so narrow and so much more equally hairy or 
papillose that they become in some genera almost, in others quite, 
like those of Vernoniacew or Eupatoriaces. Where the disk-florets 
are sterile, the style-branches are usually filiform and connate to 
the end. The achenes are various, usually angular or terete and 
striate, truncate or shortly contracted at the end, not beaked, 
flattened only in two or three small genera, and never winged. 
The pappus almost always setose and copious ; the sete usually fine 
