168 The Romance of Wild Flowers 
tumunr)—that grows with its roots deeply buried 
on sandy shores, so dry and hot that it seems im- 
possible any plant could live in them—is a yet more 
puzzling plant.to put into the hands of a budding 
botanist with a request that he should name its 
family at sight. The pale-blue flowers are gathered 
into dense heads with stiff bluish-green bracts inter- 
spersed among them, which give them a thistle-like 
appearance. This condition is brought about by the 
suppression of the usual foot-stalks to the flowers. 
Then, too, we get in this species an advance upon the 
simple round or oval leaf: the radical ones are here 
almost round, but the upper leaves are deeply lobed, 
and the lobes are arranged lke the fingers on a 
hand (palmate); the margin of the lobes is thickened, 
and runs out into long spines like those of the Hoily, 
and the plant is even more prickly than TJlex 
aquifolium. 
The little Sanicle (Sanicula europea), that grows 
in thickets and on the borders of woods, is another of 
these umbel-bearers that appear at first sight to be 
something altogether different. The umbels of pinkish 
flowers are very small, half-round, and the outer 
flowers contain stamens only. The leaves are an 
advance in complexity upon those already described: 
they are palmate, but each principal lobe bears 
smaller lobes, and the margins are regularly toothed. 
These leaves may now be compared with those of the 
Cow Parsnip, which are often as much as three feet 
long ; they are distinctly broken up into leaflets, which 
are more or less pinnately divided, and the lobes 
toothed. By considering a series of leaves produced 
by different species in one family, we may get indica- 
