FOES IN THE HAY FIELD. 99 



plant. While the flowers still preserve throughout the 

 same fundamental botanical type, they vary so much 

 from kind to kind in all conspicuous outer peculiarities 

 that a casual observer would probably fail to see any 

 resemblance at all between them. Even this little minor 

 group of half-parasitic root-suckers has several different 

 shapes of flowers, each adapted in a particular fashion of 

 its own to insect fertilisation. Again, their colouring 

 varies widely. If you take a very simple and primitive 

 group like the buttercups, you will find dozens of species 

 all of the same golden yellow, and all uniformly coloured 

 in every part of the flower. But if you take a family 

 like these snapdragons, you will find no two species 

 coloured alike, and most species wonderfully spotted 

 and dappled with mingling yellow, blue, and purple. 

 Once more, the leaves vary immensely : each kind hits 

 out a separate type for itself, and adapts it exactly to 

 the soil and sunlight of its particular situation. 



With such universal plasticity of constitution as this, 

 it is easy to understand how the parasitic habit could 

 have been acquired and maintained. The little eye- 

 bright which grows so abundantly on roadside commons 

 is still, perhaps, in the earliest stage of the practice. Its 

 flowers are most like the blue speedwells, though much 

 streaked with red, white, and purple ; and its roots only 

 suck nutriment slightly from the thin rootlets of the 

 grasses about it. It does far less harm in meadows than 

 yellow-rattle, and is hardly recognised by farmers as a 

 distinct enemy at all. Next to it, apparently, come the 

 two red-rattles marshy plants with much more special- 

 ised flowers, and queer fleshy jagged leaves : they also 

 do but little practical damage, because they frequent 



