YELLOW 



prepossessing, and the small barbed seed-vessels so cleverly fulfil 

 their destiny in making one's clothes a means of conveyance to 

 ' ' fresh woods and pastures new " as to cause all wayfarers hearti- 

 ly to detest them. ''How surely the desmodium growing on 

 some cliff-side, or the bidens on the edge of a pool, prophesy the 

 coming of the traveller, brute or human, that will transport their 

 seeds on his coat," writes Thoreau. But the plant is so con- 

 stantly encountered in late summer, and yet so generally un- 

 known, that it can hardly be overlooked. 



The larger bur-marigold, B. chrysanthemoides (Plate LXXXL), 

 does its best to retrieve the family reputation for ugliness, and 

 surrounds its dingy disk-flowers with a circle of showy golden 

 rays which are strictly decorative, having neither pistils nor 

 stamens, and leaving all the work of the household to the less 

 attractive but more useful disk -flowers. Their effect is pleasing, 

 and late into the autumn the moist ditches look as if sown with 

 gold through their agency. The plant varies in height from six 

 inches to two feet. Its leaves are opposite, lance-shaped, and 

 regularly toothed. 



B. cernua, the small bur-marigold, is found often without 

 ray-flowers; when these are present they are shorter than the 

 leaflike involucre which surrounds the flower-head. Its leaves 

 are irregularly toothed, and lance-shaped. Its height varies, 

 being anywhere from five inches to three feet. 



WILD LETTUCE. 



Lactuca Canadensis. Composite Family. 



Stems. Noticeably tall, from four to nine feet high; leafy; smooth or 

 nearly so. Leaves. Usually six inches to a foot long; pale beneath; tht, 

 upper lance-shaped and not toothed ; the others usually wavy, lobed, or cut. 

 Flower-heads. Pale yellow ; small; composed of strap-shaped flowers ; nu- 

 merous in usually long and narrow clusters. 



The wild lettuce is common in the wet and somewhat open 

 thickets of late summer. It is perhaps rendered more conspicu- 

 ous by its unusual height and lobed leaves than by its insignifi- 



186 



