SOME PLANT BIOGRAPHIES. 195 



downward at first for still further safety against 

 chill or injury. These various devices enable the 

 coltsfoot to blossom earlier in the season than 

 almost any other insect-fertilised flower, and so to 

 monopolise the time and attention of the first 

 flower-haunting March insects. 



Coltsfoot is a composite by family ; so its 

 flowers are collected together into a head, after 

 the ancestral fashion, and enclosed by an invo- 

 lucre which closely resembles a calyx. But the 

 type of flower-head differs somewhat from that 

 in any of the composite plans I have hitherto 

 described for you, because its outer florets are 

 not flat and ray-shaped, but strap-like or needle- 

 shaped. The inner florets, however, are bell- 

 shaped, and much like those of the common daisy. 

 The naked scapes, each resembling to the eye a 

 shoot of asparagus, and .each crowned by a single 

 fluffy yellow flower-head, are familiar objects on 

 banks or railway cuttings in the first days of 

 spring; I have known them open as early as the 

 1 2th of January, in sunny weather. But they grow 

 entirely without leaves, and are produced at the 

 expense of the material laid up in the underground 

 stem by last season's foliage. They blossom, are 

 fertilised, set their seeds, turn into heads of white 

 feathery down, and produce ripe fruits which 

 blow away and get dispersed, all before the leaves 

 begin to appear at all above the soil. Thus you 

 never can see the foliage and flowers together ; it 

 is only by close observation that you can discover 

 for yourself the connection between the heads of 

 yellow flowers which come up in early spring, and 

 the groups of large angular woolly leaves which 

 follow them in the same spots much later in the 

 season. 



