Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/117

 Rh especially with the plowshare. Thus the very efforts we make at fighting Nature defeat themselves: if we persistently hoe down the stems and leaves of an obnoxious weed, the weed retaliates by sending out hidden subterranean suckers, and the last state of the agriculturist is worse than the first.

On the close-cropped chalk downs of our southern counties there is another curious form, the stemless thistle, which shows in another way the hard struggle of Nature to keep up appearances under the most difficult and apparently hopeless circumstances. Among the low sward of those chalky pastures, nibbled off incessantly as fast as it springs up by whole herds of Southdowns, no plant that normally raised its head an inch above the surface would have a chance of flowering without being eaten down at once by its ruthless enemies. So the local dwarf or stemless thistle has adopted a habit of expanding its very prickly leaves in a flat rosette or spreading tuft close to the ground, and bearing its blossoms on the level of the soil, pressed as tight as possible against the short turf beneath. The appearance of these three or four dwarfed and stunted but big flower-heads, bunched thickly together in the middle of their flat leaves, is most quaint and striking when once one's attention is called to their existence: yet so unobtrusive and unnoticeable is the entire plant that few people save regular botanists ever discover the very fact of its presence on the chalk downs. It is only one out of a large group of specialized chalk plants, all of which similarly creep close to the ground, while a few of them actually bury their own seeds in the soil by a corkscrew process, so as to escape the teeth of the all-devouring sheep. The power of producing a stem, however, is rather dormant than lost in the dwarf thistle, for under favorable circumstances and in deep soil it will raise its flowers eight or ten inches above the surrounding turf.

The question what particular plant ought to be identified with the stiff, heraldic Scotch thistle has long been debated, somewhat uselessly, it must be acknowledged, among botanists and antiquaries. For heraldry is not particular as to species and genus: it is amply satisfied with a general rough resemblance which would hardly suit the minute requirements of those microscopical observers who distinguish some forty kinds of native British blackberries. However, it has been amicably decided in the long run that the heraldic symbol of Scotland, that proud plant which no man injures unavenged, is not to be considered a thistle at all, but an onopord, a member of a neighboring though distinct genus, whose Greek name expressly marks it out as the favorite food of—how shall I put it with becoming dignity?—the domestic beast of Oriental monarchs. To what base uses may we come at last! The royal emblem of the north, as identified by Mr. Bentham and other profound authorities, is now at last settled to be nothing more nor less than the cottony donkey-thistle. North