2 Burs in the Borage Family. (January, 
The genus Eritrichium here offers instructive illustrations. It 
is very nearly Yelated to the stickseeds. One end of its series of 
thirty or forty species is very near to Myosotis, or forget-me-not ; 
the other, in all its characters other than that of the grappling 
fruit, comes very near to Echinospermum, or stickseed. Now, 
among species at both ends of the series—in some and not in 
others —a tendency to bur-like fruit is manifested. The four 
seed-like nutlets, either smooth or moderately and variously 
roughened, fall out of the calyx at maturity, and take their 
chance. But in a few of them, in one especially which is found 
upon our higher Rocky Mountains, a wing-like circle of prickly 
teeth is developed around the back, which calls to mind the sim- 
ilar grappling border of a common western stickseed, except that 
its rays are not barbed. Yet in a recent monograph of the 
American species it is said that “ they bear a few rigid, bristly 
points; which only need to turn backward to be glochidiate,” 
that is, to become grappling barbs. In another species, Æ. Cali- 
fornicum, the little nutlets usually have a merely wrinkled or 
roughened surface ; but we have lately observed, in what we 
must regard as a form or state of it (var. subglochidiatum), that 
the crest of the rugosities rises here and there into short, bristly 
points, and the tips of some of these, under a lens, show minute 
but distinct backwardly turned barbs. Then, quite at the other 
end of the genus there is a species, Æ. pterocaryum, which has three 
of its four nutlets wing-margined, the wing essentially resembling 
that which, in the commoner stickseed of the same western re- 
gion, often connects the rayed circle of barbs; and this wing is 
now and then found to be broken up into narrow lobes or teeth, 
which only need barbs to convert this outlying Lritrichium into 
an Hchinospermum. The bearing of such facts upon the ques- 
tion of the origin of the efficient burs of stickseeds and the like is 
obvious. 
But this same genus, Hritrichium, in some cases secures disper- 
sion by cattle in another way. It is a common character of the 
Borage family to have the herbage and the calyx beset with stiff 
and sharp bristles, in some even pungent or stinging. In one set 
of species, nearly confined to our western plains and thence to 
California (the section Krymitzkya), the fruit-bearing calyx in- 
clines to close loosely over the four small and smooth or unap- 
pendaged seed-like nutlets, at maturity a joint forms underneath, 
and the whole falls off together. In most of these the bristly 
hairs that clothe the calyx are particularly strong and sharp; and, 
