342 Field, Forest, and Wayside Flowers 



sides of these leaves are often thickly clothed with 

 long, cobwebby hairs, nets to snare the little clam- 

 berer and hold her. 



A persevering insect which labors to the top of 

 the stem past the deterrent leaves finds herself 

 before an armed body-guard which surrounds the 

 flowers, a close frill of small leaves, often with 

 recurving margins and thickly set with thorns. 

 And in some kinds of thistle a crawler which has 

 worried through all these obstacles meets and suc- 

 cumbs to a still greater difficulty at last. The 

 many flowers which compose the thistle-head grow 

 all together in a deep-green cup. This cup is 

 made up of overlapping scales, and around it, in 

 many varieties of thistle, more cobweb is wound. 



In the common swamp- and pasture-thistles (Fig. 

 96) each scale of the cup has in its centre a whitish 

 streak, which is very glutinous. Here the luckless 

 crawler comes utterly and finally to grief, after all 

 her struggles and in full view of her goal. She is 

 held fast on the gummy streaks, and her frantic 

 struggles to free herself only result in bogging her 

 more hopelessly. The gum after a while stops up 

 the little holes in her sides through which she 

 breathes, and she is thus smothered to death. 



Her fate is not only tragic but perplexing for 



