LXXX.— GOLDILOCKS. 
Ranunculus auricomus L i n n e . 
I N the early days of April, before the majority of our trees have unfolded their 
leaves, many a dry copse or bank is enlivened by the bright green and gold of 
this unpretentious Buttercup. It can stand some shade or much sun, and rejoices in 
a moist loam rich with leaf-mould : it can hold its own among the young grass of 
spring, with Primroses, I.ady’s-smock, and Yellow Archangel ; but it rarely occurs 
in actually marshy ground. From the situations in which it is often found it has 
been called the Wood Crowfoot. Tragus, Caspar Bauhin, and Morison were 
unquestionably justified in terming it Ranunculus pratensis^ one of the meadow 
species, that is ; but Fuchs, John Bauhin, and Ray showed, perhaps, more 
discrimination in styling it sylvestris, sylvaticus, or nemorosus, a native, that is, of 
woods or groves. 
The exceptional absence of any acridity in its juice earned for it from several of 
these early writers the additional descriptive epithet dulcis, or sweet. 
Species of Ranunculus^ such as R. Ficaria^ R. Lingua^ or R. Flammula, with 
undivided leaves cannot be appropriately termed Crowfoots ; but this species in this 
respect resembles the Buttercups rather than the Spearworts. 
It is a perennial with a short rhizome giving off copious fibrous rootlets and 
long-stalked, rounded radical leaves, more or less deeply three- to seven-lobed. The 
lobes are obtuse, wedge-shaped, crenate or variously cut, and generally downy. The 
aerial stem branches and rises erect to the height of about a foot ; and both it and its 
flower-bearing branches are round and not furrowed, and very often slightly downy 
with adpressed hairs on their upper parts. They bear leaves very different from 
those springing from the ground, being sessile and deeply divided into three or more 
spreading narrow linear segments. 
The freely-produced blossoms are sometimes three-quarters of an inch in 
diameter, and the pale yellow colour of the calyx, and sometimes of the upper part 
of the flower-stalk, adds to the general yellow effect, and has thus secured for the 
species the specific name auricomus^ from the Latin aureus^ golden, and coma^ hair, 
and its literal seventeenth-century translation Goldilocks. The sepals spread 
outwards but are never reflexed : they are downy and often fringed with hair, and 
are said to be more developed and more petaloid in texture when the petals are 
defective. The petals may be absent altogether, which is, perhaps, the distinctive 
character of what has been termed the variety depauperata ; but though, if present, 
the individual petals are larger and brighter yellow than the sepals, we do not 
remember ever to have seen a blossom in which all five petals were present and 
equally fully and perfectly formed. There is normally a single nectariferous gland at 
the base of each petal, without the scale which in most species of Ranunculus protects 
the honey. As we said when speaking of the Winter Aconite, however, a large series 
