8 
As the first effort of an artist, who on this occasion had to be 
initiated into plant-drawing, the coloured delineations now offered 
must be regarded as fairly creditable. Some imperfections have 
been amended in the full descriptions elucidative of the illustra- 
tions. Furthermore, these plates of a publication, which the 
Agriculture Department intends to distribute very widely over 
our colony, will perhaps, along with the descriptive letter-press, 
thus serve also educational purposes, at drawing lessons and 
at botanic teachings. That delineations of plants of so large a 
size had to be brought within such narrow pictural space, arose 
from the necessity of rendering this little treatise conformous to 
the other literary issues of the Victorian Agricultural Department. 
To the Honorable the Minister and the Secretary of the 
Agriculture Department I beg to tender my best thanks for pro- 
viding the means and for other facilitations afforded to elaborate 
this publication. 
I. 
CABDUUS LANCEOLATUS, Linne. 
(Cnicus lanceolatus, CL F. Hoffmann ; Cirsium lanceolatum, Scopoli. ) 
The Spear-Thistle, called also but inaccurately the Scotch 
Thistle ; one of the Plume-Thistles. 
Indigenous to Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa ; 
here the commonest and most readily spreading of all Thistles. 
A formidable plant. Height to several or even many feet, but 
only once flowering from the same root under ordinary circum- 
stances. Stems and branches robust, furrowed, beset with mostly 
crisped hairlets. Leaves decurrent, the largest when well de- 
veloped to one foot long, mostly pinnatifid, but some particularly 
the upper less divided, often also irregularly prickly denticulated ; 
on the upper side rough from minute straight rigidulous hairlets ; 
on the lower side more or less bearing a lax somewhat webby 
or cottony but not close vestiture, or rarely quite whitish-lanu- 
ginous ; the lobes often almost semilanceolar, undivided or some 
incised, always terminated by a conspicuous pungent spinule. 
Headlets of flowers erect, comparatively large, approached by 
diminutive floral leaves, singly terminating branches, or two or 
more rather near together by the shortness of approaching 
branchlets. Involucre almost globular or somewhat ovate, soon 
open, consisting of numerous conspicuous rigid spinescent and 
mostly spreading bracts lanceolate or subulate-linear in form, 
and usually bearing some weblike vestiture below, the innermost 
hardly pungent. Receptacle copiously beset between the flowers 
with setular-capillulary bracts. Corolla of the flowers upwards 
purplish (shown in our analytic plate hardly of a sufficiently 
bright tinge), thinly tubular to the middle, towards the summit 
