Wild Flowers of Georgetown. 337 



we see the sticky seeds of the common bird-vine and 

 the red-stemmed bird-vine (Loranthus Theobromx and 

 ruficaulis) carried by the kiskadees that have feasted on 

 the berries to the very branches that these plants need 

 to germinate upon, though many unfortunates get planted 

 on iron railings and other unpromising sites. And thus 

 the loafing idler who knocks down a tempting mango 

 from its parent-tree, and after a brief and stolen indul- 

 gence throws away the seed a quarter of a mile further 

 on, is unconsciously carrying out one of the great pur- 

 poses of nature in a rather different way. 



An important order, the composite-flowered plants 

 (Compositcr) , can be dismissed briefly here, as although 

 it is computed to contain over ten thousand species, the 

 local kinds are mostly small and unimportant. Perhaps 

 the most ubiquitous weeds of our roadsides and waste 

 grounds are two little plants with small, dingy lilac, 

 groundsel-like flowers, which become rather more con- 

 spicuous, though scarcely more beautiful, when the 

 whitish pappus begins to appear. The stouter kind, 

 with rounded undivided leaves, is called soldier's tassel 

 from the resemblance of its seeding flower-heads, on a 

 small scale, to the ornament that used to be worn on the 

 fronts of soldiers' caps. The weaker and somewhat 

 less abundant kind has narrow leaves variously jagged 

 and cut, and is known as thistle-weed. In plants 

 like these what is commonly called the flower is really a 

 flowerhead, containing a number of tiny separate flowers. 

 Thus if we pick a flower of the little cultivated 

 daisy-like feverfew (Pyrethrum) that forms a border 

 to the Oval at the Gardens, we are really gathering 

 a bunch of more than a hundred and fifty minute 



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