White and Greenish 



sacred symbol, has been employed in religious ceremonies of most 

 tribes. Snakes may be revered in other lands, but only in Amer- 

 ica is the rattlesnake worshipped. Among the Moquis there stil 1 

 survives much of the religion of the snake-worshipping Aztecs. 

 Bernal Diaz tells how living rattlesnakes, kept in the great temple 

 at Mexico as sacred and petted objects, were fed with the bodies 

 of the sacrificed. Cortes found a town called by the Spaniards 

 the City of Serpents, whose walls and temples were decorated with 

 figures of the reptiles, which the inhabitants worshipped as gods. 

 The Downy Rattlesnake Plantain (P. pubescens), usually a 

 taller plant than the preceding, with larger cream-white, globular- 

 lipped flowers on both sides of its spike, and glandular-hairy 

 throughout, has even more strongly marked leaves. These, the 

 most conspicuous parts, are dark grayish green, heavily netted 

 with greenish or silvery-white veins, silky to the touch, and often 

 wavy edged. This plant scarcely strays westward beyond the 

 Mississippi, but it is common East. It also blooms in midsummer, 

 and shows a preference for dry woods where oak and pine abound. 

 (Illustration facing p. 177.) 



Lizard's Tail 



(Saururus cernuus) Lizard's-tail family 



Flowers Fragrant, very small, white, lacking a perianth, bracted, 

 densely crowded on peduncled, slender spikes 4 to 6 in. long 

 and nodding at the tip. Stamens 6 to 8, the filaments white; 

 carpels 3 or 4, united at base, dangling. Stem: 2 to 5 ft. high, 

 jointed, sparingly branched, leafy. Leaves: Heart-shaped, 

 palmately ribbed, dark green, thin, on stout petioles. 



Preferred Habitat Swamps, shallow water. 



Flowering Season June August. 



Distribution Southern New England to the Gulf, westward to 

 Minnesota and Texas. 



The fragrance arising from these curious, drooping, tail-like 

 spikes of flowers, where they grow in numbers, must lure their in- 

 sect friends as it does us, since no showy petals or sepals advertise 

 their presence. Nevertheless they are what are known as perfect 

 flowers, each possessing stamens and pistils, the only truly essential 

 parts, however desirable a gayly colored perianth may be to blos- 

 soms attempting to woo such large land insects as the bumblebee 

 and butterfly. Since flies, whose color sense is by no means so 

 acute as their sense of smell, are by far the most abundant fertilizers 

 of waterside plants, we can see a tendency in such to suppress their 

 petals, for the flowers to become minute and massed in series that 

 the little visitors may more readily transfer pollen from one to an- 

 other, and to become fragrant just what the lizard's tail has done. 



169 



