THE YELLOW HORNED-POPPY. 131 



scabrous in character, a term employed to define a certain 

 roughness of texture, arising- from the presence of a number 

 of little harsh inequalities in the surface. The flowers 

 spring on short stems from the axils of the leaves ; they are 

 large in size, and handsome both in form and colour, but 

 only last in perfection a very short time, as the petals one 

 after another very soon fall away. The flower has four 

 petals, and two sepals. As in the case of the common 

 scarlet poppy, already referred to, the sepals are thrown off 

 on the expansion of the blossoms. The stamens are very nu- 

 merous, and closely surround the conspicuous stigma, occu- 

 pying the centre of the flower. The flowers are succeeded 

 by the very characteristic pods that give the plant its 

 common name. The limited space at our disposal has 

 prevented our doing anything like justice to them in our 

 illustration. The flowers are of the natural size, but we 

 have had to rest satisfied with representing a pod in an 

 early stage of its development. These pods ultimately 

 grow about a foot long, and when some twenty or so 

 of them, fairly well grown, are met with on a plant, they 

 give it a peculiarly quaint effect. From the long time 

 that the plant continues blossoming it will almost always 

 be possible to find the flowers and pods in all stages of 

 development, and to trace the pod from the specimen where 

 it is just beginning to lengthen over the heads of the 

 stamens, right up to the fully-matured example that 

 requires a foot-ruler to do justice to its proportions. 



The only other species in the genus is the G. Phceniceum, 

 or scarlet horned-poppy. The flowers are scarlet, as the 

 name imports, each petal having a black spot at its base. 

 In most other respects it is not altogether unlike the yellow 

 horned-poppy. It flowers in June and July, but is so very 



