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Flowers very small individually, but borne in large clusters, and yellow, the showy part being the four large, pure white bracts which subtend each cluster of blossoms, much like those in Cornus florida, only the bracts are more pointed than those of the latter species.
Such tests have been made by various experimenters. In the dandelion the bracts of the involucre give the best characters.
Gradually the green pales to purest white, and the four broad bracts, with the peculiar little pucker at the end of each, swell out from the real flowers, which look like stamens, to a diameter of often four inches. With these flowers clustered thickly on the usually flat, straight branches, the effect against the green or brown of near-by trees is startling.
The ordinary green dahlia has large tufts of green bracts instead of flowering heads, the scales of the receptacle having assumed the texture and venation of leaves, and being in some measure as fleshy.
A very curious instance of reduced bracts, developing to unusual size, is afforded by a variety of corn, which is called Zea Mays cryptosperma, or Zea Mays tunicata. In ordinary corn the kernels are surrounded by small and thin, inconspicuous and membranaceous scales. Invisible on the integrate spikes, when ripe, they are easily detected by pulling the kernels out.
This conclusion being accepted, the accidental re-apparition of bracts within the family must be considered as a case of systematic atavism, quite analogous to the re-appearance of the scapes in the acaulescent primrose.
Penzig in his valuable work on teratology gives a list of 33 such genera, many of them repeating the anomaly in more than one species. Ordinary cabbages are perhaps the best known instance, and any unusual abundance of nourishment, or anomalous cause of growth seems to be liable to incite the development of bracts.
A somewhat similar design is painted on the side of the helmets of some katcina dancers, where the bracts or petals are colored in sequence, with the pigments corresponding to the six directions north, west, south, east, above, and below. In the decoration on the ancient Sikyatki bowl we find seven peripheral bracts, one of which is speckled.
For it has no touch of that unrest of soul which is expressed by the spire, and still more by the compound spire, with its pinnacles, crockets, finials which are finials only in name; for they do not finish, and are really terminal buds, as it were, longing to open and grow upward, even as the crockets are bracts and leaves thrown off as the shoot has grown.
This differs considerably from the common plant, not only in stature, but in the time of flowering. In this species the bracts at the calyx base are small compared with those of U. europaeus, while the smaller flowers are produced during summer, and when not a bloom is to be found on its supposed parent.
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