254 The Romance of Wild Flowers 
and in the stigma being unequally divided into two 
lobes. All these things point to a common origin for 
all the species included in these six groups. They 
have all become adapted for fertilisation by bees. 
We will briefly pass these genera in review. 
The Cow-wheats (Melampyrum) aftord another 
example of science embalming an old error in Greek 
and letting it serve for a scientific name. The plants 
have no relation whatever to the wheat whereof 
flour is made, nor is it a favourite food of cattle: 
rather is the prefix “cow” meant to indicate that 
the wheat-like seeds produced by the plant are 
spurious and worthless. The Purple Cow-wheat (JI. 
arvense) grows in cornfields, and its seeds are like 
black wheat-grain. Upon this foundation there grew 
up a legend that if any of these seeds were threshed 
out with the wheat and ground into flour, all the 
bread made from it would be black. Wherefore do 
serious botanists speak of the plant by the name 
Melampyrum, which they got from two Greek words, 
melas, black, and puros, wheat. 
Only one species is widely common, and that is 
the Common Yellow Cow-wheat (W/. pratense), with 
slender leaves, and two-lipped tubular corollas that 
become relatively wide at the mouth. At the bottom 
of the tube honey is secreted by a basal expansion of 
the ovary, and to enable humble-bees with their long 
tongues to get at this nectar-store the mouth of the 
corolla is so wide that they can put their heads 
inside. Looking at the flowers as they grow, this 
statement would strike one as an error, for clearly 
the corolla is too slender for a humble-bee’s big head, 
especially when a couple of yellow pouches are seen 
