ENGELMANNIA PINNATIFIDA. 

 CUT-LEAVED ENGELMANN FLOWER. 



NATURAL ORDER, COMPOSITTE. 



Engelmannia PINNATIFIDA, Torrey and Gray. — A perennial branching, rough and hirsute 

 herb with branching stems, corymbose paniculate at the summit, and bearing several small 

 heads on slender peduncles. Leaves alternate, strigose, oblong or ovate lanceolate, ir- 

 regularly pinnatifid, with the segments lanceolate or linear (the lower longest or divaricate), 

 sessile, the radical petiolate and bipinnatifid. Rays yellow, tardily deciduous, pubescent 

 externally. Heads many-flowered; the ray flowers equal in number to the inner scales 

 of the involucre (eight to ten) and situated in their axils, ligulate, pistillate; involucre in 

 three series, coriaceo-chartaceous, broadly ovate or obovate, appressed, the exterior short- 

 est, all abruptly narrowed into a foliaceous lanceolate or linear spreading appendage, the 

 exterior exceeding the scale itself in length. Receptacle flat ; the chaff persistent, char- 

 taceous, with foliaceous and hairy tips, partly involute and enclosing the sterile flowers ; 

 the outer series lanceolate acute, two firmly adherent to the base of each involucral scale ; 

 the others very narrowly linear, rather obtuse. Corolla of the ray with an oblong exserted 

 sessile ligule ; of the disc dilated upwards, fine-toothed, the teeth somewhat hairy, style in 

 the sterile flowers undivided hispid. Achenia of the ray equal in size to the concave inner 

 involucral scales to which they are applied, oval-obovate, obcompressed, convex and car- 

 inate externally, flat or concave, and one-ridged on the inside, scabrous pubescent, not 

 "winged or toothed, crowned with two small scarious lanceolate concave marcescent squa- 

 mellas, which are more or less united at the base, hispid and fringed ; those of the disc 

 filiform, abortive, with a minute coroniform pappus. (Torrey and Gray's Flora of N^orth 

 America.') 



HEN proposing to ourselves to prepare the present 

 work, it was not our intention to make it botanical 

 in its strictest sense, but that while botanically accurate, it 

 should rather be a work for the whole people. Hence it was 

 decided to give only the characters of the species in full, con- 

 finincr the text to those facts in relation to the genera and the 

 orders, which might serve to illustrate some general lesson. By 

 the long quotation we have now given from Torrey and Gray, it 

 might be supposed we had forgotten this original plan, and the 

 long paragraph of "hard words" may startle some who have 



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