Rushes and Sedges 193 
after accomplishing their life-work. The pistil has 
done its work, too. It is now a fruit, ripe and 
ready to travel, for around it are six long hairs, 
which are the petals and sepals, altered over into a 
flying apparatus. In the ‘‘beak-rush,’’ which we 
may find growing near the ‘‘ wool-grass,’”’ calyx and 
corolla have undergone an equally great but 
wholy different adaptation. 
They are converted into barbed bristles, which 
catch hold where and when they can, and thus 
help the seed along in the world. 
The calyx and corolla of the pretty ‘‘cotton- 
grass’’ are changed, like those of the ‘‘wool- 
grass,’’ into long streamers, which lengthen as the 
seed matures, and become a tuft of creamy fila- 
ments, an inch or two in length. They make this 
sedge a conspicuous and beautiful object in low- 
lying fields, when olive and bronze shades begin 
to replace the vivid greens of the earlier year 
(Fig. 51). 
The true ‘‘bulrush” and the ‘‘spike-rush” 
(Fig. 51), which are both sedges, in spite of their 
misleading names, have adopted the beak-rush’s 
plan, and changed their petals and sepals into 
toothed bristles, which look, through the micro- 
scope, like narrow saw-blades, 
