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The most abundant flowers were Mazaruni daisies, cheerful little pale primroses, and close to me, fairly overhanging the paper as I wrote, was the spindling button-weed, a wanderer from the States, with its clusters of tiny white blossoms bouqueted in the bracts of its leaves.
Returning to activity the scapes at once show a full development, in no way inferior to that of the allied forms, and only unstable in respect to their length. A second example is afforded by the bracts of the crucifers. This group is easily distinguished by its cruciform petals and the grouping of the flowers into long racemes.
Perennial marjoram rises even 2 feet high, in branchy clumps, bears numerous short-stemmed, ovate leaves about 1 inch long, and terminal clusters or short spikes of little, pale lilac or pink blossoms and purple bracts. The oval, brown seeds are very minute. They are, however, heavy for their size, since a quart of them weighs about 24 ounces.
The systematic importance of this phenomenon, however, is far greater than in the first case, in which we had only to deal with a specific character, while the abolition of the bracts has become a feature of a whole family. This reversion is observed to take place according to two widely different principles.
An evergreen shrub, with oblong, light green leaves and terminal inconspicuous greenish flowers, surrounded by an involucre of four large, pinky-yellow bracts. It is this latter that renders the shrub so very conspicuous when in full flower.
Here, an involucre or common cup-shaped receptacle of hooked bracts surrounds an entire head of purple tubular flowers, and each of these flowers produces in time a distinct fruit; but the hooked involucre contains the whole compound mass, and, being pulled off bodily by a stray sheep or dog, effects the transference of the composite lot at once to some fitting place for their germination.
Aroids sometimes produce long bracts from various places on their spadix, as may be seen in the cultivated greenhouse species, Anthurium scherzerianum. Poppies have been recorded to bear bracts analogous to the little scales on the flower-stalks of the pansies, on the middle of their flower stalks. A similar case is shown by the yellow foxglove or Digitalis parviflora.
In all these cases the bracts behave as with the Erucastrum, being limited to the base of the spike, and decreasing in size from the lower flowers upward. Connected with these atavistic bracts is a feature of minor importance, which however, by its almost universal accompaniment of the bracts, deserves our attention, as it is indicative of another latent character.
The scapes themselves are of varying length, often very short, and seldom long, and their umbels display the involucre of bracts in a manner quite analogous to that of the Primula officinalis and P. elatior.
Other instances could be given proving that bracts and stipules, when systematically lacking, are liable to reappear as anomalies. In doing so, they generally assume the peculiar characters that would be expected of them by comparison with allied genera in which they are of normal occurrence.
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