XII. — LORDS- AND-LADIES. 
Arum maculatum Linne. 
I T is not surprising that this remarkable plant, common as it is and widely 
dissimilar from all other British plants, should have attracted much attention from 
very early times. We shall not here be able to deal with a tithe of the popular 
names it has received. 
The great Family Aracea to which it belongs, comprising upwards of a hundred 
genera and a thousand species, is very largely tropical. Many of them grow as 
epiphytes on the boughs of trees in moist Equatorial forests : others have large 
starchy underground stems. Many are acrid or poisonous, though in some cases 
the deleterious properties may be dissipated by heat. A sagittate leaf with complex 
reticulate venation commonly, but by no means always, occurs ; and the flowers are 
usually massed together on a fleshy cylindrical spadix and enclosed in a large 
sheathing bract or spathe. The fruit is a berry. 
There are two British species of Arum , closely similar ; but Arum italicum Miller 
is rather larger than the commoner species and is confined to our southern coasts. 
Arum maculatum L. has an annual starchy corm or premorse rhizome, formerly 
used in starching linen, and, not very long ago, as food, under the name of Portland 
arrow-root. From it spring the glossy, hastate leaves, with sheathing bases and often 
spotted with purple, whence the name maculatum. In some places, however, the 
leaves are not so spotted, and the meaning of these spots, or of their absence, is as 
yet unknown. The leaves are full of needle-like microscopic crystals, which prick 
the tongue and so produce some at least of the sensations of a pungent irritant. 
In April, at the season when the cuckoo arrives, and rather in advance of the 
leaves, the scape rises from the corm swathed round with the pallid yellowish spathe. 
This spathe reaches a height of from six to ten inches and is borne erect, tapering to 
a slender apex. At about a quarter of its height it is contracted so as to form an 
ovoid basal chamber, while the upper three quarters so unfolds as to disclose the 
upper extremity or appendix of the spadix. The spathe is often edged, spotted, or 
blurred at the back with purple ; and, as in all Aroids, just before it unfolds, the 
rapid formation of floral structures in the basal chamber is accompanied by so con- 
siderable an evolution of heat that the temperature within the chamber is markedly 
in excess of that of the external air. The flowers are confined to the basal portion 
of the spadix, the club-shaped appendix being filled with starch and a reddish-purple 
or yellow colouring-matter. These two varieties are apparently the “ lords ” and 
“ladies” respectively of country children. Though in a much less degree than many 
related exotic forms, this species, especially the luridly purple variety, gives off a 
fetid, carrion-like smell, which is attractive to flies, as perhaps also is the warmth 
within the hollow base. 
