CXXIX.— THE SALAD BURNET. 
Poterium Sanguisorba Linne. 
T hough, as we have seen by the instance of Alchemilla, there are small- 
flowered plants among the Rosacece, the general characteristic of that Family is 
certainly the possession of conspicuous, pentamerously-symmetrical, insect-pollinated 
flowers. When we find a group of plants in such a Family as this, unquestionably 
related to that Family in its general structural characters, but with inconspicuous 
blossoms adapted in several respects to wind-pollination, we suspect it to be rather a 
case of degeneracy or reversion than the survival of a primitive type of the Family. 
This seems certainly to be the case with the Burnets, all of which are now often 
included under the genus Poterium. 
The genus comprises some thirty species of perennials, mostly herbaceous, 
though sometimes shrubby. Their pinnate leaves with small, toothed leaflets gave 
them the name of Pimpinell or Pimpernel, by which they were very generally known, 
the mediaeval Latin bipennella becoming the Italian Pimpinella and the French 
Pimprenelle. As in so many of the Rosacece, here again we find stipules adnate 
to the petiole. 
The small flowers are crowded together in dense heads, each flower having a 
bract and two bracteoles, a four-cleft calyx, but no corolla. The terminal or central 
flower of the head opens first, and the flowers are often polygamous. The stamens 
vary in number from four to thirty. When few, as in Poterium officinale Hooker 
filius {Sanguisorba officinalis Linn6), they are short and rigid and are associated with 
honey in perfect flowers ; but when many, as in the Salad Burnet {Poterium Sanguisorba 
Linn6), they have slender filaments hanging out of the honeyless flowers, and the 
stigmas consist of the mop-like tuft of threads characteristic of wind-pollination. 
Thus it would seem that the Great Burnet {Poterium officinale) is more frequently 
entomophilous itself and nearer to the originally entomophilous ancestry of the 
group than the Salad Burnet {Poterium Sanguisorba). Even the latter, however, is 
stated to be occasionally visited by flies, solitary wasps, and other insects. There 
are from one to three carpels, each with one pendulous ovule ; and the adherent 
receptacular tube becomes hardened and four-angled in the fruit stage. 
The name Burnet probably belonged in the first instance to the larger species, 
the rich brown of its sepals recalling a particular brown cloth known in Italian 
as brunetta, in French as brunette. The red sepals of Poterium Sanguisorba, with their 
olive-green margins, have no such suggestion. Possibly Fuchs’s name Sanguisorba^ 
from the Latin sanguis., blood, sorbeo, I absorb, which Linnaeus took both as a generic 
name for the larger, and as a specific one for the smaller, species, referred originally 
to the blood-red colour with which these plants, like the similarly acidulated Docks, 
