Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/694

674 One might spend weeks over the exquisite Compositœ, whose examples are incomparable. Here, again, the aid given by the enlarged details is incalculable, and it is delightful to be able to study the infinite variations of the multitudinous florets without the microscope. Let us note the difference of detail shown in three species of a single genus. Here are the three Encelias—farinosa, canescens, and eriocephala respectively—California plants with what might be described as starry, yellow flowers, all much alike in the careless eye of the amateur botanist. Each of the three species shows in detail a single floret enlarged from ten to twenty times, and also one of the surrounding ray flowers. In studying these we begin to find in what respects the flowers do not resemble each other.

E. canescens shows the receptacle and a chaff scale, varying in form from that of E. farinosa, a scale of the involucre with its silvery hairs and the fruit magnified ten times.

In the third species (E. eriocephala) the color as well as the form of the floret differs from those of the first-named species—the yellow, tubular floret with its protruding pistil deepening to a warm brown, thus giving to the crowded head of flowers the appearance of a dark, velvety disk amid t-:e surrounding rays of a brilliant yellow.

The foliage, too, of the three species shows a marked distinction in coloring, that of E. canescens being of a rich warm green,which in E. farinosa changes to a glaucous blue-green, while in E. eriocephala both stem and leaves assume a downy texture.

The Asters and Erigerons are wonderfully perfect, from the young buds showing only the involucral scales or the tips of the closed ray flowers, to the matured flowers in which the discoid florets are fully opened, while the rose or purple rays curve inward as they fade.

Such plants as Bromelia pinguin and Ananassa sativa, together with the Cactaceœ, demonstrate the impossibility of rendering these plants satisfactorily through any other medium than the glass used here. The heavy flowers of the Opuntias and the Cereus, their fleshy stalks and spiny leaves, are too substantial to be satisfactorily preserved either in alcohol or by drying. In the glass model we seem to see the living plant.

The barbed leaves of the Bromelia keep their free outward curve as if to defend from trespassers the strong, club-shaped spike from which spring in spiral ranks the pink-purple flowers, each in turn protected by a flower sheath tipped with fierce scarlet. The whole plant has a martial aspect—it is a warrior, and a dried specimen of it would fail to give any idea of its true character.

The Orchids might be dwelt on at great length did space