Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/82

70 woods than when hanging from the branching tops of the slender, wandlike plants. It is seldom that a complete pod is found, for the deeply cut joints of the one-seeded lobes need only a gentle pull to break them. The lobes have a raspy feel, and a pocket lens shows their flat sides to be thickly covered with minute, curling hairs, and few "stickers" are harder to pull off than those of the desmodiums, since they cling closely by their whole surface to any woolly substance.

A group of "stickers" that frequently adorn the wanderer through autumn woods are those of the bedstraw or cleavers of the genus Galium. In some of the species the low, trailing stems and their leafy branches are roughened with small, hooked bristles, while in others, as in the common cleavers, or robin-run-the-hedge, the fruit also is thus armed and adhesive. Circæa, the enchanter's nightshade, that grows so abundantly in the depths of cool, moist woods, contributes a large share to the motley collection of "stickers," its small, burlike fruit being covered with tiny, hooked prickles. So in the species of comfrey, or hound's tongue, the nutlets are rough-coated with an armament of short barbs and hooks that fasten themselves to the wool and hair, and are very troublesome to sheep that stray into the copses along the pasture side. The fruit of one species, familiarly known as "beggar's lice," is one of the most annoying pests of the woods, and Gray, at the end of his technical description of the plant, calls it "a common and vile weed."

Among the Compositæ there are comparatively few plants which effect their dispersal in this parasitelike way, most of the forms developing the characteristic downy structures known as pappus, like the dandelion and the thistle, that float their seeds away on the wings of the wind. Some species, however, like the bur-marigolds, have fallen into the parasitic mode of dispersal, and these are mostly plants of the low, tangled thickets along streams and in swampy places. The many-flowered heads of the bur-marigold ripen in the