BOTANY 



SiW 



BOTANY 



SOME MEMBERS OF THE NIGHTSHADE FAMILY 



garden be not very well kept, there grows an 

 ugly weed a cocklebur. It has nothing beauti- 

 ful about it, nor is it of any use. Nobody 

 planted it or knows how it came there perhaps 

 the dog brought home the burry seeds in his 

 coat and shook them off here; and now every- 

 one calls the plant a nuisance and wishes it 

 out of the way. But the wonderful thing is 

 that these two, the poppy and the weed, can 

 grow there within a few inches of each other, 

 in exactly the same soil, and while the poppy 

 takes water and food and turns them into soft 

 green leaves and delicate flame-colored flowers, 

 the cocklebur takes up water and food and 

 makes them into harsh, rough leaves and 

 troublesome burs. It is one of the unsolvable 

 mysteries of nature, which even the wisest of 

 scientists do not fully understand. 



Plant Families. Very curious, too, are the 

 family relationships which exist -among the 

 plants. In the animal world the cat, the tiger, 

 the lion and the panther all belong to the same 

 family, but that does not seem strange, for they 

 all look very much alike. A child, seeing a 

 tiger for the first time, will naturally call it 

 "a great, big kitty." No one is surprised to 

 learn that the dog and the wolf are of one 

 family, for some kinds of dogs look enough like 

 wolves to be cousins, if not brothers. In the 

 plant world, too, there are some relationships 

 that cause no surprise that the blackberry and 



the raspberry should be close connections, for 

 instance, is perfectly natural. But in some of 

 the families there are members which do not 

 look in the least like each other, and only a 

 botanist would dare class them together. This 

 grouping into families, indeed, is one of the 

 most difficult and skill-requiring tasks of the 

 botanists, and no child can hope to master 

 the technical classifications and the hard-sound- 

 ing Latin names the Liliaceae, the Amarylli- 

 daceae, and so on. But the facts about many 

 of the best-known families are simple enough. 



The Lily Family. There is the lily family, 

 for instance. The name calls up at once the 

 Easter lily, the day lily, the lily of the valley, 

 the Chinese lily, and many other beautiful 

 flowers, but it does not suggest the tulips and 

 the hyacinths, the dog-tooth violets and the 

 trilliums, all of which are just as truly members 

 of the lily family. Two other members are 

 thought of as vegetables rather than as flowers ; 

 these are the onion, with its unpleasant scent, 

 so different from that of a true lily, and the 

 asparagus, which certainly does not look like a 

 lily in any way, but has resemblances that only 

 a botanist can see. (See illustration, in article 

 LILY.) 



The Rose Family. There is also the inter- 

 esting rose family. "O yes," exclaims the child 

 who is fortunate enough to have a garden, 

 "that's a big family. There's the Cherokee 



