THE GREEK VALERIAN TRIBE. l65 



blueish green leaves, and huge, bell-shaped, dingy, 

 greenish-purple blossoms. 



With these. Botanists associate the Gilias, with 

 their heads of blue, or red, or party-coloured flowers, 

 and finely cut leaves, the Collomias with their small 

 buff^ or brick-red blossoms, peeping from among close 

 glandular bracts, Ipomopsis with its innumerable pen- 

 dent tubes of scarlet and gold, and the Greek Valerians 

 (Polemonium), or Jacob's Ladder plants, the old- 

 fashioned gardeners' pets, with their spreading fern- 

 like leaves, and nodding bells of blue or white. 



We will, however, study none of these. Let us ra- 

 ther examine a plant of this charming annual lately 

 imported by the Horticultural Society from California 

 (P/«^eXLIII. 1.) ; it is called Many-coloured Slender- 

 tube (Leptosiphon androsaceus). Observe how deli- 

 cately it is frosted by little glandular hairs ; millions 

 of millions of these bodies must be perpetually em- 

 ployed in separating from the blood of the Slender- 

 tube the matter which Nature requires it to part 

 with. Its leaves are divided into deep narrow lobes, 

 which all spring from near the same point. Its flowers 

 stand in an umbel, at the end of a slender stalk, and 

 have their bases buried among narrow green bracts. 

 Each calyx (Jig. 3.) has five, narrow, sharp-pointed, 

 hairy lobes, connected into a short tube by a thin 

 web (jig. 3. a.). The corolla has a slender, reddish- 

 browTi tube, with a spreading, five-lobed, pale, lilac 

 border, yellow at the base, and within the tube deep- 

 chocolate brown (^fig. 2.). It has five anthers, sta- 

 tioned on short filaments at the orifice of the tube, 



