Wild-Flower Study 



501 



Fruit capsule and seed. 



and splits into three sections when ripe. The 

 seeds are numerous and are fleshy and crescent- 

 shaped. 



But the adder's tongue, like many other early 

 blooming flowers, is a child of the spring. The 

 leaves, at first so prettily mottled, fade out to plain 

 green; and by midsummer they have entirely dis- 

 appeared, the place where they were, being covered 

 with other foliage of far different pattern. But 

 down in the rich woods soil are the plump globular 

 corms filled with the food gathered by the spotted 

 leaves during their brief stay, and next spring two 

 pairs of spotted leaves may appear where there was 

 but one pair this year. 



The adder's tongue going to seed 

 Photo by Veme Morton. 



LESSON CXVIII 



Adder's Tongue, or Dog-tooth Violet 



Leading thought — The adder's tongue is a lily, and its mottled leaves 



appear early in the spring, each pair coming from a corm deep in the soil 



below. It has two ways of spreading, one underground by means of new 



corms growing from the larger ones, and the other by means of seeds, 



