WATERSIDE WEEDS. 183 



larly interspersed with a few casual green scales. Nothing 

 can well be prettier than the various stages of the female 

 or nut-bearing heads, from the time when they first 

 appear as close bundles of pearly knobs till the time 

 when they finally assume the ripe shape of prickly 

 defensive capsules. Each tiny flower in these heads 

 still retains a slight rudiment of its lost petals in the 

 shape of three or six little scales surrounding its ovary ; 

 but in the male flowers, the scales disappear almost 

 entirely, or survive only as irregular or obsolescent organs 

 scattered up and down among the stamens of the densely 

 packed head. The more thickly the blossoms are clus- 

 tered, the more are the now useless relics of the petals 

 crowded out between their really serviceable organs. 



And now if we turn to the cat's-tails or reed-maces 

 that grow hard by out of the water itself, we can see the 

 same process carried to the furthest possible extreme of 

 degradation. I suppose everybody knows them by some 

 name or other, as black-cap rushes or something of the 

 sort those great smooth round stems, four or five feet 

 high, surmounted by a thick woolly looking black cylinder 

 by way of a head. In reality, this cylinder is an immense 

 mass of such wind-fertilised flowers, crowded together 

 literally by myriads along a dense spike on the stem. 

 The top part, which grows fluffy and withers after a short 

 time, consists of the male blossoms, here reduced to naked 

 stamens only, with a few inconspicuous hairs scattered 

 among them to represent the scales that once were petals. 

 The lower part, which becomes thicker and longer as the 

 autumn wears away, consists of the female flowers, 

 reduced to very minute ovaries, each surrounded by a 

 bundle of small hairs, which similarly stand for the 



