Yellow and Orange 



Flowering Season — June — September. 



Distribution — Minnesota and Kansas, eastward to Nova Scotia and 

 Florida. Europe. 



Leaving the fluffy thistle-down he has been kindly scattering 

 to the four winds, the goldfinch spreads his wings for a brief un- 

 dulating flight, singing in waves also as he goes to where tall, 

 thick-set mullein stalks stand like sentinels above the stony pas- 

 ture. Here companies of the exquisite little black and yellow 

 minstrels delight to congregate with their sombre families and 

 feast on the seeds that rapidly follow the erratic flowers up the 

 gradually lengthening spikes. 



Delpino long ago pointed out that the blossom is best adapted 

 to pollen-collecting bees, which, alighting on the two long, pro- 

 truding stamens, rub off pollen on their under sides while cling- 

 ing for support to the wool on the three shorter stamens, whose 

 anthers supply their needs. As a bee settles on another flower, the 

 stigma is calculated to touch the pollen on his under side before he 

 gets dusted with more ; thus cross-pollination is effected. Three 

 stamens furnish a visitor with food, two others clap pollen on him. 

 Numerous flies assist in removing the pollen, too. 



" 1 have come three thousand miles to seethe mullein cultivated 

 in a garden, and christened the velvet.plant," says John Burroughs 

 in "An October Abroad." But even in England it grows wild, and 

 much more abundantly in Southern Europe, while its specific 

 name is said to have been given it because it was so common in 

 the neighborhood of Thapsus ; but whether the place of that name 

 in Africa, or the Sicilian town mentioned by Ovid and Virgil, is 

 not certain. Strange that Europeans should labor under the erro- 

 neous impression that this mullein is native to America, whereas 

 here it is only an immigrant from their own land. Rapidly tak- 

 ing its course of empire westward from our seaports into which 

 the seeds smuggled their passage among the ballast, it is now more 

 common in the Eastern States, perhaps, than any native. Forty 

 or more folk-names have been applied to it, mostly in allusion to 

 its alleged curative powers, its use for candle-wick and funeral 

 torches in the Middle Ages. The generic title, first used by Pliny, 

 is thought to be a corruption of Barbascum = with beards, in al- 

 lusion to the hairy filaments, or, as some think, to the leaves. 



Of what use is this felt-like covering to the plant ? The im- 

 portance of protecting the delicate, sensitive, active cells from in- 

 tense light, draught, or cold, have led various plants to various 

 practices ; none more common, however, than to develop hairs 

 on the epidermis of their leaves, sometimes only enough to give 

 it a downy appearance, sometimes to coat it with felt, as in this 

 case, where the hairs branch and interlace. Fierce sunlight in 

 the exposed, dry situations where the mullein grows ; prolonged 

 drought, which often occurs at flowering season, when the perpet- 



330 



