WATERSIDE WEEDS. 173 



And if yon look closely at the separate flowers them- 

 selves, you will see that they each bear obvious marks of 

 their ultimate derivation from bright petal-bearing pro- 

 genitors in their possession of four little green scales 

 surrounding their stamens, the last stunted relic of their 

 original colored corolla. This is a case where degrada- 

 tion has only gone, comparatively speaking, a very little 

 way. We can still see on the face of the flower the 

 rudiments of its former petals, though all their function 

 is now lost. 



Turn next to the bur-reed here, this much-branched 

 bushy-looking succulent plant whose long lance-like 

 leaves closely overhang the shallow edge of the pool. 

 Its flowers look at first sight like mere round knobs or 

 balls, stuck quaintly on to the side of the thick juicy 

 branches, and decreasing in size toward the ends of the 

 green twigs, from the diameter of a whiteheart cherry 

 to that of a small pea. But when you come to look 

 more closely into them, you can see that they are of two 

 kinds, the larger and lower ones consisting of little 

 pointed nuts, all crowded together in a dense globe ; the 

 smaller and upper ones composed of clustered stamens, 

 irregularly interspersed with a few casual green scales. 

 Nothing can well be prettier than the various stages of 

 the female or nut-bearing heads, from the time when 

 they first appear as close bundles of pearly knobs till the 

 time when they finally assume the ripe shape of prickly 

 defensive capsules. Each tiny flower in these heads still 

 retains a slight rudiment of its lost petals in the shape of 

 three or six little scales surrounding its ovary ; but in 

 the male flowers, the scales disappear almost entirely, or 

 survive only as irregular or obsolescent organs scattered 

 lip and down among the stamens of the densely packed 

 head. The more thickly the blossoms are clustered, the 



