226 PLANTS OF MASSACHUSETTS. 



ish taste. This plant is relished well by cattle, and may form very 

 good food for them, according to the recommendations of it. 

 Biff. 



•o" 



ORDER 260. PISTIACE.E. Duck-weed Tribe. 



The simplest of the flowering plants ; a mere leaf or leares, 

 with root-like appendages, floating on water. Pistia, from which 

 the order is named, grows in India and in the West Indies. 

 Flowers 2, a single stamen and pistil, rising from the margin of 

 the leaf ; properties of no consequence. 



Lem>"a. L. 2. 1. Duck-weed. Duck-meat. 

 Stamens 2, near the pistil ; utricle 1 - 5-seeded ; floating. 



L. minor. L. Leaves 2 or 3, scale-like, entire, small, 

 smooth, with a single undivided fibre or root passing into the 

 water but not into the earth. Often covers many rods of ponds. 



L. polyrhiza. L. Water Flax-seed. Often mixed with the 

 other ; rather larger, firmer union of leaves, which send out several 

 fibrous roots ; abundant. 



L. trisulca. L. Floating like the others ; leaves half an inch 

 long, thin, mostly pellucid, with a single root on the under side, 

 sending out a stem from a slit in the leaf, and thus producing 

 another leaf, and proliferous in this manner, and appearing like 

 leaves strung along or attached to a filamentose stem. 



All these species of Lemna, originating in seed, are propagated 

 by leaves produced from leaves already formed ; flowers very 

 minute, very rarely seen, appearing in spathe-like openings in the 

 side of the leaves ; a very curious genus of plants, but of little 

 known use. 



