REVELATIONS IN HAIRS 
brittle, contorted forms but are liber- 
ally interspersed with a longer and 
slender type regular constricted into 
globules like tiny beads strung on a 
wire and angularly bent once or twice 
in its length (Figure 2). 
The adjoining kitchen garden is an- 
other source of supply and this bit of 
withered turnip leaf holds several sur- 
prises even for him to whom these 
beauties are no secret. In his superior 
knowledge that the Cruciferae or cross- 
worts offer the greatest variety of 
branched hairs he goes confidently 
prospecting with his mind’s eye on the 
qui vive for some form with prongs or 
branches, and is first astonished, and 
somewhat disappointed, at finding not 
a branched hair at all but a collection 
of single, conical shafts slightly con- 
stricted near their bases and rising 
from a series of rounded ridges as seen 
in Figure 3. A closer inspection holds 
another oddity in that this plant has 
decreed that its hairs shall themselves 
be Esaus and in turn be hairy. 
First astonished at the straight, un- 
branched form, he is next “surprised at 
his own astonishment,” as it were. Not 
a branched hair? Why, it’s a solid 
mass of branches. Each little hair along 
its length is one of its branches, and 
H9 
not having room for the number at its 
base, it has strung them out in appar- 
ently a series of whorls in imitation of 
the common “horsetail” of our marshes. 
Not content with this, our turnip 
holds still another “trick up its sleeve” 
for, not to be outdone by the pampered 
geranium, it also flares the tip of an 
occasional hair into a tiny elfin morn- 
ing-glory. 
The contribution from the common 
button chrysanthemum will be a type 
wholly different and known among the 
botanists as a peltate hair. The name 
is derived from a Greek word Pelte, 
meaning shield or, perhaps better, from 
the Latin word peltata, meaning armed 
with a shield. 
At first glance, both leaf and stem 
appear merely “woolly,” but by scrap- 
ing the surface of a leaf — one of the 
smaller ones near the tip of the stem 
is best — these scrapings are found to be 
no longer “just hairs” but contain some 
surprisingly curious forms. 
We first see a number of tiny, double- 
pointed Zulu shields of most tenuous, 
crinkled crystalline membrane as 
shown in our picture (Figure 4). A 
•curious feature of these little shields is 
that each contains, at its center, a 
small, brownish spot. This is a queer 
FIG. 2— HAIRS OX STEM AX'D LEAF OF COMMOX RAGWEED. 
