CO BN CROWFOOT. 135 



says, " the leaves of sampire, but nothing so greene, but 

 rather of an overworne colour." This last adjective, though 

 quaint, is a peculiarly happy and descriptive one, and very 

 aptly describes the dull and somewhat faded-looking colour 

 of the foliage. The flowers of the corn crowfoot are of 

 rather a pale yellow; they have neither the rich golden hue 

 nor the large size of the blossoms of most of its brother crow- 

 foots or buttercups. By the way, we may here remark that 

 in all the old herbals the plural of crowfoot is crowfeet. 

 The corolla consists of five ovate petals, glossy on their 

 inner surfaces, and rather conspicuously veined on the outer. 

 The spreading calyx, made up of five sepals, is whitish yellow 

 in fact, in almost all the ranunculuses we find it a sort of 

 faint colour echo of the corolla, instead of the decided green 

 tint that we expect to see in most flowers. The stamens 

 are comparatively few in number. The large and flattened 

 carpels that form the fruit of the plant are a very curious 

 and interesting feature, the prickles with which they are 

 covered on each side tending to render them noticeable. 

 In the small-flowered ranunculus, R. parviflorus, the 

 carpels are covered with small tubercles, but the feature is 

 by no means so conspicuous as in the present plant. In 

 our remarks on preceding species of the genus we have 

 explained the significance of the generic name, a sig- 

 nificance far more appropriate in the case of many of the 

 other crowfoots than in the present instance, as our plant is 

 no lover of the damp low-lying meadow-lands, or the ditches 

 and streams that are the home of most of the other members 

 of the genus. The specific name is from the Latin word 

 arvum, a ploughed field, and exactly describes the habitat of 

 the plant. All these plants are called crowfoot from a fancied 

 resemblance between a bird's foot and the form of the foliage. 



