COMPOSITE. (COMPOSITE FAMILY.) 133 



or apically barbellulate or crisped bristles. Female flowers with oblong or narrower 

 and terete or flattish akenes, and a copious fine-capillary pappus, the soft and naked 

 bristles of which are commonly united at base, so as to fall in a ring. Low peren- 

 nials. 



19. Anaphalis. Heads dioecious, but usually with a few hermaphrodite sterile flowers in 



the centre of the female heads. Pappus of male flowers of bristles little if at all 

 thicker at the apex : of the female flowers not united at base but falling separately. 

 Otherwise as in the preceding ; the female plant differing from the following only in 

 the sterility of the few central flowers. 



20. Gnaphalium. Heads heterogamous, fertile throughout, of few or many series of 



female surrounding a smaller number of hermaphrodite flowers. Involucre imbricated 

 in many series : the scarious and commonly partly woolly bracts with or without col- 

 ored papery tips or appendages. Style of hermaphrodite flowers 2-cleft. Pappus of 

 numerous merely scabrous capillary bristles, in a single series. 



Tribe V. HELIANTHOIDE^. Female flowers ligulate and radiate, or the heads 

 sometimes hornogamous by their absence : disk-flowers all with regularly 4 to 5-toothtd 

 corolla. Leaves mostly opposite. 



* Ray-flowers ligulate and fertile, the ligule mostly deciduous ; disk -flowers hermaphrodite- 

 sterile : akenes usually coriaceous ; the style mostly entire : receptacle chaffy through- 

 out, except in No. 24. 



- Involucre double ; exterior of 4 or 5 herbaceous or foliaceous plane bracts ; interior of a 

 single series of small bracts, which completely and permanently enclose the obovate or 

 oblong more or less compressed smooth and glabrous akenes with a pericarp-like acces- 

 sory covering, at length deciduous together : pappus none. 



21. Melampodium. Fructiferous bracts commonly indurated, naked or unarmed. 



Receptacle convex or conical. Akenes more or less obovate and incurved. 

 *- -t- Involucre broad, of plane or barely concave bracts ; innermost subtending obcom- 



pressed (mostly much flattened) akenes, but not enclosing nor embracing them. 



H- Ray-flowers and akenes in more than one series, and with elongated exserted deciduous 



ligules : the akeues falling free, or with only the subtending bract. 



22. Silpliium. Heads large, many-flowered. Involucre of thickish more or less folia- 



ceous imbricated bracts ; the innermost small and chaffy. Receptacle comparatively 

 small, the central part somewhat turbinate in age : its chaffy bracts linear, flat, or 

 involute around the abortive ovaries. Corollas of the ray with a long and spreading 

 ligule on a very short tube ; of the disk cylindrical-tubular. Akenes very flat and 

 broad, imbricated in 2 or 3 series, completely free from the subtending bract and from 

 those of adjacent male flowers, surrounded by a winged margin which is produced 

 more or less beyond the summit on each side into a callous tooth or auricle. Pappus 

 none or sometimes a pair of short rigid awns or teeth, with which the wing is con- 

 fluently united. 



+ -H- Ray-flowers and akenes in a single series, with very short or even obsolete ligules : 

 akenes with 2 or 3 bracts of sterile flowers attached to their base on the inner side, 

 which they take with them, and commonly also the subtending involucral bract, when 

 they fall : heads small. 



23. Parthenium. Fertile flowers 5, with obcordate or 2-lobed almost sessile concave 



ligule, or a truncate emarginate cup. Bracts of the involucre chartaceous or partly 

 herbaceous, and the inner more scarious : those of the usually conical receptacle 

 cuneate, tomentose at summit, partly enclosing the sterile flowers. Akenes oval or 

 obovate, commonly pubescent, surrounded by a filiform callous margin, which is 

 firmly coherent at base with the bases of the bracts of the contiguous pair of sterile 

 flowers and of the subtending bract, at length tearing away from the akene ; the sum- 

 mit bearing the marcescent corolla. Pappus of two chaffy awns or scales, or some- 

 times hardly any. 



24. Parthenice. Fertile flowers 6 to 8. with ligule obsolete or reduced to 2 or 3 small 



teeth : sterile flowers 40 or 50, with funnelform corolla Involucre of 5 somewhat- 

 herbaceous oval exterior bracts, and of 6 or 8 somewhat larger orbicular-obovate and 



