UNUSUAL FORMS IN PLANTS. 



373 



the guiding, fostering hand of the skilled gardener was here shad- 

 owed forth in the field of waste land. 



A week or so later, while going through a similar field in an 

 adjoining county to the one where the daisy freak was found, I came 

 upon nearly the same thing as seen in the heads of the " black-eyed 

 Susan," or cone flower (Rudbechia hirta L.). Here were the two 

 leading weedy daisies, the white and the yellow, the former coming 



Fig. 1. — Green and Normal Oxete Daisy Heads. 



to our fields from the East and across the sea, while the latter, as a na- 

 tive of our Western prairies, journeys to make a home here and help 

 to compensate by its pestiferous presence for the vile weeds that 

 have gone West with the advance of civilization. Both of these 

 daisies revealed that tendency in them to vary in their floral struc- 

 tures that if made use of by the floriculturist might result in forms 

 and colors as attractive and profitable as -met with in their cousins 

 the chrj'santhemums of the Orient. 



Perhaps the season which we have had, with its excess of moist- 

 ure and superheat, has made the abnormal forms more abundant 

 than usual. The even current of life has been met by counter 

 streams, so to say, and the channels were broken down. In walking 

 through a meadow in early June it was a common thing to find 



