ROBBERY AND MURDER. 249 



exactly the general form and appearance of our 

 Dodders ; but, strange to say, the structure of its 

 fruit and flowers obliges us to class it with the Laurel 

 family, to which it has otherwise not the slightest 

 resemblance. It has no leaves, and its stems are 

 lax, slender, yellowish threads, which ramble far and 

 wide over the bushes, and lace them with a strange 

 kind of web ; the flowers greenish-white, very small 

 and inconspicuous. If it really descended from the 

 same original stock with the magnificent Laurel- 

 trees of tropical forests, the time when it branched 

 off from them must have been inconceivably remote." 

 But we have a tolerably large tribe of vegetable 

 robbers which practise their craft underground in- 

 stead of upon trees and shrubs, and whose rootlets 

 feel out for and seize on the roots of other plants. 

 Their flower-stems then rise above the ground, look- 

 ing as if they had been developed in a fair and honest 

 manner. Their brown, sometimes purplish, flowers 

 are of high organisation, but their leaves are reduced 

 to mere brown scales — so long is it since they 

 performed any legal and honest leaf- functions ! 

 The most notorious of these parasites are the Broom- 

 rapes iOrobanchacecB), popularly so called because 

 there are few of our ancient heaths and commons 

 where this class of plants does not grow upon the 

 roots of the Broom and even of the Gorse. We 

 may also see them in every Cloverfield, where their 

 comparatively huge stems are brutally forcing the 



