Daisies and Thistles 193 
a spider having utilised them as convenient pegs 
from which to hang his nets. They are purely 
vegetable, however, but probably they are as effective 
as genuine spiders’ webs in keeping off or detaining 
any honey-stealer that is seeking to anticipate the 
opening for business purposes. All the flowers are 
tubular, but the upper portion of each is expanded 
and ends in five long slender lobes. The style arms 
scarcely separate ; they are downy, and beneath them 
is a ring of hairs which serves for sweeping the 
pollen out of the tube. The pappus-hairs, or thistle- 
down, are in this group fine but rough; when their 
work is completed, they drop off the fruit. It used 
to be written in books on birds that this thistledown 
plays an important part in the interior furnishing 
of the goldfinch’s nest. The goldfinch is well known 
to have a great fondness for Thistle - seeds, and 
perhaps it would have been excusable on the part of 
the general public to assume that her nest was lined 
with the pappus-hairs; but a naturalist should have 
reflected that autumn is the time for thistledown 
and spring for the building of nests. It is the down 
from Groundsel and the woolly webs from Coltsfoot 
leaves that the goldfinch uses for this purpose. 
The Welted Thistle (C. crispus), which has a 
branched stem, produces much smaller heads, of more 
oval form, and to make up for their defect in size 
these are produced in bunches—another of the 
abundant illustrations that insect-fertilised flowers 
will attain publicity by some means: if the associa- 
tion of a hundred tiny florets into one head will not 
do it effectually, then the heads must also be laid 
together. 
