EPIPHEGUS VIRGINIAN A. 



BEECH-DROPS. 



NATURAL ORDER, OROHAXCIIACE^. 



■HEGUS ViRr.iNtANA, Bartoii. — Annual, slender, a foot or so high, with thickened base, 

 producing short, fibrous, matted roots, glabrous, dull purple or yellowish-brown, panicu- 

 lately branched; scales and bracts minute and sparse; cleistogamous flowers a line, and 

 capsules two lines long; developed corolliferous flowers along the upper part of the 

 branches three to six lines long, purplish and whitish. (Gray's Svnoyical Flora of Xorlh 

 America. See also Gray's Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States, Chap- 

 man's Flora of the Southern United States, and Wood's Class-Book of Botany.) 



PIPHEGUS VIRGINIANA is one of those strange 

 li^^l plants which are supposed to feed on the vital sap of 

 other organisms. The whole of the order Ovobanchacccc, to 

 which the plant belongs, is, indeed, composed of these vegetable 

 vampires. It received its name from the genus Orobanchc, of 

 which we have no indigenous representative in the United 

 States. That the peculiar habits of these plants were already 

 well known to the ancients, is evident from the old Greek name 

 Orobanchc, which occurs in several classical authors, and signifies 

 " a strangler of vetches." The oldest known species in England 

 was called " Broom-Rape," because it was supposed to grow 

 mainly on the roots of the broom, and Dr. Lindley, therefore, 

 designated the whole order as the " Broom-Rape Family." 



In explanation of this common name, Dr. Prior, the accepted 

 authority on the popular names of British plants, tells us that it 

 comes from " broom, a plant, upon which it is parasitic, and rape 

 (Latin, rapa\ a turnip, which its clul^by, tuberous stem somewhat 

 resembles." But there is no English species with a thickened 

 stem having any very striking resemblance to a turnip. The base 



