154 ^/^^ Composites. 



It grows abundantly in the grass by the roadside near Bos: jn, but probably 

 with small roots. It is used as a forage-plant in some parts of Europe. 

 It grows two feet high, and has blue flowers. The seeds of the sunflower 

 furnish good food for fowls, and they are relished by some animals. These 

 seeds, and a few others, furnish a mild, eatable oil. A very few others 

 furnish food in other lands. Succor^', endives, and cardoons are the 

 blanched leaves of three congeners of cichory. Scorzonera resembles 

 salsify. Dahlia-tubers have been eaten, and also the roots of a very few 

 others. 



The compositae are more important as medicines. Arnica, wormwood, 

 chamomile, elecampane, boneset or thoroughwort, blessed-thistle, safflower 

 or bastard saffron, colt'sfoot, dandelion, and lettuce, all are known to us as 

 medicines ; but few if any imported drugs are furnished by this order. The 

 gall-of-earth, Nabalus Frascri, is a dangerous emetic ; while two of its con- 

 geners in North America, and many composites in South America, enjoy 

 a questionable reputation in snake-bites. 



But to return to the compositae. A few of them yield resins : one of 

 these, Silphium laciniatum^ is called the compass-plant, because its leaves 

 mostly face to the north or south. The flowers of several yield dyes, as 

 safflower, dahlia, and cichory. But the list of useful compositae is very 

 small, considering the vast number of plants in the order ; and the whole 

 of it would scarcely be missed from the catalogue of human comforts were 

 it to be struck out of creation. 



We are now ready to examine the structure of the flowers. Let us take 

 a large blossom of the sunflower. It is not a single flower, but a head 

 {capitulum is the definite term), with hundreds of flowers seated on its broad 

 receptacle. What you take for a calyx is an involucre ; and its component 

 parts are not sepals, but bracts, which, in this case, are called scales. By pick- 

 'm<y off the flowers one by one, we find them nestled in chaff, which adheres 

 to the whole surface of the receptacle. The chaff consists really of bracts 

 also, — a name that embraces every thing of the character of leaf outside the 

 calyx that is related to the flower. Many of the receptacles are naked ; 

 that of the dandelion, for instance. 



Now let us detach a single flower from towards the centre, including, of 

 course, the " seed," as you call it, on which it stands. As the real seed is 



