THE CORN POPPY— continued. 
blossom, with delicate red petals and numerous stamens, have gained for it in various 
countries such names as Corn Rose and Canker Rose, or the French Rose de Tchen^ 
i.e. Dog Rose. 
The meaning of the name Rhoeas^ first employed as a specific name for the Corn 
Poppy by Lobel, is not quite certain. It occurs in Theophrastus as /5oia?, rhoias^ 
and is probably connected with poict, rhoia, a name for the pomegranate, referring to 
the resemblance between poppy-capsules and that fruit. Dodoens and other botanists 
of the Renaissance, however, thought the name to be derived from peco, rheo^ I flow, 
referring either to the quickly-falling petals or to the abundant milky juice, and they 
accordingly used the term Papaver liquidum. 
This species has an erect, branching stem and pinnatifid or bi-pinnatifid leaves 
with ascending lobes, a finely-toothed margin, and a terminal bristle. Both the stems 
and the flower-stalks are rough, with spreading, or in one variety adpressed, stiff 
hairs. On the two sepals, which fall as the flower opens, are similar, but more 
upright, hairs. The large rich scarlet petals are sometimes black at the base and are 
described by a seventeenth-century writer as 
“crambed up within the empalement (calyx) by hundreds of little wrinkles or puckers, as if three or four Cambrick 
Hankerchiefs were thrust into one’s pocket.” 
Though they smooth themselves out into a blossom three to four inches in 
diameter they retain a wavy margin, and are so delicate that insects visiting the 
honeyless flowers for the sake of the pollen usually alight on the stigma. 
The ovary is smooth and becomes a sub-globose capsule, with eight to twelve 
stigmatic rays. As each stigmatic ray stands over one of the placentas, which 
project into the interior of the ovary and are covered with ovules, it is apparently 
formed by the union of half the stigmas of two carpels. When the capsule is ripe 
it dehisces by a series of minute valves under the projecting stigmatic lobes ; and, as 
the capsule is then borne erect on the stiff withered peduncle, the seeds are well 
protected from the rain and are only shaken out, a few at a time, as the fruit sways in 
the wind. When the seeds are sprouting, variations occur with three, four, five, or 
six cotyledons. 
The mildly narcotic character of the latex, due, no doubt, to alkaloids similar to 
those which have been discovered in such great variety in opium, extends to the 
flower, the capsule, and the seeds ; but seems to have been somewhat exaggerated in 
popular belief, as indicated by such names as Headaches, Earaches, and Blind-eyes, 
while the dedication to Hypnos and Thanatos, the gods of sleep and death, in ancient 
Greece may have belonged rather to the Opium Poppy. Cowley, however, gives 
poetical expression to the thought when he says that “ the poppy is scattered over 
the fields of corn that all the needs of man may be easily satisfied, and that bread 
and sleep may be found together.” 
