SEPTEMBER 



31 



by making use of rainy days, particularly if the plants 

 are growing in the school yard. 



The florets of the sunflower are large and, therefore, 

 excellent for strictly botanical study. Two sunflowers 

 will be enough for a whole class, one to be kept entire to 

 show the relationship of the parts. From the other, both 

 ray and disk flowers should be removed, giving one of 

 each kind to each child, and saving the now chaffy re- 

 ceptacle surrounded by the 

 green, leaf-like involucre for 

 the class as a whole. 



The ray flowers have 

 neither stamens nor pistils. 

 Their only reason for ex- 

 istence is to make the head coROLLPtf 

 more conspicuous. The disk stamens--|| 

 flowers, whose duty it is 

 to set seed, have corolla, five 

 stamens, and a pistil, with 

 a two-cleft stigma, like other 

 tubular flowers of this order. 

 The calyx consists of two or 

 more thin deciduous scales, and, as in all of the Compos- 

 ites, of the enveloping coat of the ovary, or seed box. In 

 the younger flowers, in which the pollen is ripe, the stigma 

 has not yet opened. When it does appear above the en- 

 circling stamen heads (anthers), and opens out its inner 

 stigmatic surface, which the pollen must touch in order to 

 insure fertilization, the pollen has disappeared. But bees 

 and flies, visiting it for the sake of its honey, then bring 

 to it pollen from other flowrets. 



Black-eyed Susax, purple cone flower or yellow daisy, 

 as it is variously called, is a western flower which came to 



DISK FLOWER 



Sunflower. 



