178 



BURNET. POTERIUM. 

 COMMON BURNET. Poterium sanguisorla. 



Plate 14, fig. 8. 



A very beautiful and common plant, growing upright, with 

 one or more branched and leafy stems. Flowers purplish, in 

 heads ; with fine red, drooping stamens, thirty or forty in 

 number. Calyx four- cleft. Corolla none. Pointals two, only 

 found in the upper flowers. Seed-vessels two, each one- 

 seeded. The leaves taste and smell like Cucumber, and are 

 sometimes eaten in Spring salad ; they clothe the stem and grow 

 around in a tuft from the root, and are of an elegant, pinnated 

 form, composed of many pairs of oval, serrated leaflets, the 

 various pairs diminishing in size as they are farther from the 

 point. Flowers usually in June, but as it is constantly eaten 

 off by the sheep it throws out flowering stems at almost every 



CLASS 22. DICECIA. 



(The flowers having Stamens, and those having Pointals upon 

 different plants.) 



A small class, but rather an important one, as among foreign 

 plants many valuable ones here have place. Our Islands can 

 boast of about seventy species of the Willow, some of the 

 Poplars, the Crowberry, the Butcher 's-broom, the Misseltoe, 

 the Sallow-thorn, the Sweet Gale, which is often called English 

 Myrtle, the Hop, the Rose-root, the Frog-bit, the Juniper, 

 and that emblem of sorrow the Yew Tree. Of foreigners we 

 must not forget the Screw Pine, the Date Tree, the Pistacia 

 Nut Tree, Spinach, Hemp, the Yam, the Papaw Tree, the 

 Nutmeg, and that very remarkable object the Pitcher Plant. 



