486 THE BELLFLOWER FAMILY. 



range very general. Old men, urchins and little maids all seek it by the 

 brook's side. Some among them call the flowers " nosebleed," not, however, 

 a pretty name. They are used to dye with, and that they give up pretty 

 freely their colour can be seen by letting the corollas fall in water, which 

 then soon turns to their own hue. Country belles, 1 have been told by one 

 initiated, make from the flowers a fluid with which to touch up their cheeks. 



L. padulbsa, swamp lobelia, thrives in the waters of swamps and ponds, 

 being an aquatic. Its stem is nearly destitute of leaves, and those immersed 

 or near the base are flat, spatulate and glandular-dentate. The pale blue 

 flowers are quite small. 



L. spicdta, pale spiked lobelia, a slender, usually small one of the genus, 

 although occasionally growing as high as the great lobelia, is known by its 

 very small, very pale blue flowers produced densely in long, raceme-like 

 spikes through which are interspersed many linear, entire bracts. The 

 broadly-oblong, or obovate, leaves near the base are commonly in tufts ; 

 those of the stem are narrower, pale green and sessile. The plant's range is 

 rather general. 



L. ififlata, Indian tobacco, wild tobacco, asth-ma weed or gag-root, abun- 

 dant over an extended territory through thickets and dry fields, is decidedly 

 weedy-looking with its small, light-blue flowers quite overshadowed by 

 numerous thin, oval, or obovate dentate leaves. The plant moreover branches 

 as a panicle and is pubescent. Its stem and leaves are very acrid to the taste, 

 poisonous, in fact, and have been used in domestic practice as an emetic. But, 

 more than for any other purpose, have the Indians dried them for smoking 

 as a substitute for tobacco, to which they are somewhat similar in their bitter 

 taste. 



THE CHICORY FAHILY. 



Cichoridcec^. 



Through our rajige herbs possessed of milky, or acrid, juices, basal, or 

 alterjiate, stem-leaves afid perfect flowers all alike, which grow i?i involu- 

 crate heads. 



Corolla : gamopetalous, tubular and having a strap-shaped toothed limb. Fruit : 

 an achene generally bearing scales or bristles which represent the limb of the calyx, 

 called the pappus. 



Among common plants too well known, too often trodden on, to be more 

 than recalled as being members of the Chicory family, there is the dandelion, 



