148 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



composite family, like the daisies and the dandelions ; 

 and they have their little bells clustered together after 

 the common composite fashion into close and compact 

 flower-heads. If you cut the head through with your 

 knife, longitudinally — it is difficult to tear it open be- 

 cause of the prickly tips to the bracts — you will see that 

 it is made up of innumerable distinct purple florets : 

 each with five petals united into a long deep tube, and 

 each with a little seed-like fruit at the bottom, crowned 

 by a ring of hairs (the future thistle-down), which are in 

 fact the altered and modified relics of the original calyx. 

 Even in its simplest form, the composite flower bears 

 marks of being an extremely developed floral type ; and 

 the thistle, though relatively simple, is very far from 

 being the simplest among the composite plants. A 

 glance at the past history of the race will show why it 

 now proves so persistent and noxious an enemy to us 

 agriculturists. It is one of the most highly evolved and 

 successful of living plants ; and it pits itself against the 

 relatively simple and sickly wheat — an artificial plant 

 with a feeble constitution, which we ourselves have 

 sedulously created for our own special use. The natural 

 consequence is that if we did not give every advantage 

 to the wheat and put every obstacle we can in the way 

 of the thistles, they would live it down in a single de- 

 cade ; as European weeds are living down the native 

 weeds of New Zealand, or as English vermin are living 

 down the aboriginal marsupials of isolated Australia. 



The primitive ancestral composite — to go no further 

 back in its history than that — was already a very ad- 

 vanced sort of plant, with a number of little tubular 

 blossoms, like miniature Canterbury bells, crowded to- 



