LXIII.— THE RAGGED ROBIN. 
Lychnis Flos-cuculi Linne. 
A S we have seen already, the genus Lychnis strictly so-called consists of 
perennial herbaceous plants with a ligule at the base of the blade of the 
petal, and generally five styles. The calyx may or may not be inflated, the 
capsule may or may not have partial partitions rising from its base, and there is 
considerable variety within the limits of the genus in the mode in which the fruit 
splits when ripe. The flowers are generally large and conspicuous and sometimes 
perfumed ; whilst the deep calyx-tube holding together the long claws of the petals 
renders the honey accessible only to long-tongued insects. The conspicuous 
character of the blossoms may be heightened in various ways. In the dead-white 
blossoms of the Evening Campion ( Lychnis alba Miller), for instance, the petals 
touch so as to form an uninterrupted disk of white, very conspicuous at dusk, when 
the flower becomes sweet-scented and is visited by moths. In the Ragged Robin 
( Lychnis Flos-cuculi Linn£), on the other hand, a similar effect seems to be produced 
with great economy of material by the wide-spreading petals being each cut into 
four narrow segments. While thus attracting the larger flying insects, it is 
desirable that the plant should be able to protect its nectar from the depredations of 
smaller crawling insects that may be no service to it in pollination ; and this would 
seem to be the explanation of the viscid character of the stem in the Ragged Robin 
and other species both of Lychnis and Silene, and of the downiness of others, such as 
the Red and White Campions ( Lychnis dioica Linn6 and L. alba Miller). These 
hairs, whether glandular and viscid or not, serve to check climbing ants and other 
depredators ; but, in spite of the name Catchfly thus earned for various species of 
the two allied genera, there seems no reason to believe that these plants derive any 
nutriment from the bodies of their captives as do the Sundews and Pitcher-plants. 
From a rhizome but slightly thickened the Ragged Robin sends up slender, 
repeatedly forking, angular aerial stems from one to two feet high, slightly downy 
below with short stiff, deflexed hairs and viscid higher up, and tinged with a dark 
reddish colouring-matter. The root-leaves are stalked and broadly lanceolate ; but 
the cauline ones are narrowly linear-acuminate. The flowers open in the typically 
dichasial cyme, the terminal one first, followed by two which terminate branches 
springing from the leaf-axils on either side of the first flower, and so on. The 
branches of the inflorescence diverge widely, so that six or eight blossoms may be 
expanded simultaneously on one stem. The individual flowers have short slender 
pedicels, which are generally so bent as to place the limb of the corolla in a 
vertical plane. 
The calyx is tubular rather than inflated, and has ten dark-coloured ribs and 
five tapering teeth ; and the ligules of the petals are bifid. Honey is secreted by 
the bases of the filaments of the markedly protandrous stamens, and the anthers of 
