PRIMARY DIVISIONS OF THE ORDER. 387 
extending frequently below the ramification, but not ending in an , 
abrupt ring of hairs or swelling as in most Cynaroidew. In the 
sterile disk-florets the style is usually undivided. The achenes 
are usually rather thick, often angular, and sometimes winged, 
and never beaked, occasionally densely hairy or woolly, without 
any or with a coroniform or paleaceous pappus. 
11. Cynaroidee. 
We reduce the Cynaroidee to the last nine of De Candolle’s 
subtribes, which never have the capitula normally radiate, and in 
which the styles have usually an abrupt thickening or change of 
texture or ring of hairs below the ramification, at a point where 
the external papille commence; the branches are also usually 
very short or reduced to mere teeth. These characters, how- 
ever, are not quite constant; and it is not easy to express in 
words any definite limitation of the tribe. Some Mutisiacew 
(Gochnatiez), indeed, approach it very nearly; but otherwise I 
believe, there is never any ground for hesitation as to including or 
excluding any genus in or from it. 
The Cynaroidex are, with very few exceptions, herbaceous, and 
often assume that peculiar prickly habit which gives them the 
common name of Thistles. Their indumentum is usually loosely 
cottony or woolly, rarely silky or hispid. The leaves are always 
alternate, often sinuate or lobed or divided and prickly-toothed, but 
sometimes entire and rigidly ciliate or quite unarmed and soft. 
The involucral bracts are always imbricate, in several, often 
numerous, rows. The capitula are usually homogamous, but have 
occasionally an external row (sometimes only a very few) of 
sterile or female florets. The receptacle, often thick and hard or 
fleshy, is usually densely covered with rigid, almost paleaceous, 
sete, longer or shorter than the achenes, sometimes more or less 
united into pales at the base, in a very few small genera reduced 
to mere fimbrille or minute teeth bordering the slight pits or 
areoles of the receptacle. The corollas of the circumferential, 
neutral or rarely female, florets have the limb usually enlarged 
and regular or slightly irregular, sometimes small and distinctly 
bilabiate; or if expanded into a ligula, it is pentamerous, as in 
Cichoriaceze, only more deeply lobed, like that of Stokesia in 
Vernoniacez, never showing the trimerous ligula of the normally 
radiate tribes. The corollas of the hermaphrodite florets have 
the deeply and narrowly lobed limb of Vernoniacex, but often 
