196 HANDBOOK OF NATURE STUDY 



tilization is explained ; pods and seeds, collected the previous season ; 

 flowers of carrot, caraway, parsley, parsnip, and dill for comparison ; 

 some young milkweeds, raised from seed. 



Every child knows the milkweed, or silkweed. It is 

 called milkweed fron, the abundance of white milk which 

 trickles from the plan when it is wounded. It is also 

 called silkweed 011 account of the long, white, silky hairs 

 which are attached to the seeds. 



Description. The stout stem generally rises from a 

 thick, running rootstock, which is buried deep in the 

 ground. It grows from one to two feet high. The oval 

 leaves are rather thick, four to eight inches long, and 

 minutely downy beneath. The flowers have a peculiar dull 

 purplish tinge ; they grow in umbels, which means that 

 the stalks of the individual flowers rise at the same place 

 from a common peduncle or stalk. Other well-known 

 umbel-bearing plants are the carrot, parsley, parsnip, cara- 

 way, and dill. The flowers of the elder do not form true 

 umbels. 



The flowers of the milkweed family have a very compli- 

 cated structure, which the children need not study in detail. 

 It is important that they understand how the pollen masses 

 are transferred from one flower to another. The teacher is 

 referred to Mueller, " Fertilization of Flowers " ; Gray's 

 "Manual"; and Britton and Brown, " Illustrated Flora." 

 The pupils can understand the following about the structure 

 if they have the material before them. 



The five lower lobes are, of course, the divisions of the 

 calyx; the five lobes next above are the corolla lobes. The 

 peculiar hood-shaped bodies with a horn in the centre are 

 appendages to the anthers, whose united filaments form the 

 tube which encloses the two ovaries. 



In the plants which we have thus far studied, the pollen 

 consisted of very fine dust-like grains. In the milkweeds 



