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Ducks of various sorts were here in thousands, and the water-hens, or gallinules, which visited the settlements on the Swan some years ago, were plentiful. Mr. Gilbert shot three or four at a shot. I found a fine Baechia, which had been first found by my son James, and a curious new plant belonging to Compositae, but not yet in flower.
And so it is with many species of Compositae and Umbelliferae, and indeed of all natural orders, some of which I have on the same day gathered in ripe fruit at 13,000 to 14,000 feet, and found still in flower at 9000 to 10,000 feet. From the middle of October to that of May, vegetation is torpid above 14,000 feet, and indeed almost uniformly covered with snow.
The species of the Compositae are particularly local; and Dr. Hooker has furnished me with several other most striking illustrations of the difference of the species on the different islands.
The pistil consists of a stigma supported on the style; but in some Compositae, the male florets, which of course cannot be fecundated, have a rudimentary pistil, for it is not crowned with a stigma; but the style remains well developed and is clothed in the usual manner with hairs, which serve to brush the pollen out of the surrounding and conjoined anthers.
Advance has been along two lines, markedly in relation to insect-pollination, one of which has culminated in the hypogynous epipetalous bicarpellate forms with dorsiventral often large and loosely arranged flowers such as occur in Scrophulariaceae, and the other in the epigynous bicarpellate small-flowered families of which the Compositae represent the most elaborate type.
It is a remarkable fact, as he justly observes, that the angiospermous exogens, which comprise four-fifths of living plants a division to which all our native European trees, except the Coniferae, belong, and which embrace all the Compositae, Leguminosae, Umbelliferae, Cruciferae, Heaths, and so many other families are wholly unrepresented by any fossils hitherto discovered in the Primary and Secondary formations from the Silurian to the Oolitic inclusive.
To these a few Cryptogamic plants must be added. When we reflect on the wide separation of these plants in the series, and when we know that in some of the largest, well-defined orders, such as the Compositae, Rubiaceae, Scrophulariaceae, Liliaceae, &c., species in only two or three genera have the power of climbing, the conclusion is forced on our minds that the capacity of revolving, on which most climbers depend, is inherent, though undeveloped, in almost every plant in the vegetable kingdom.
Botany was my only resource, and as vegetation was advancing rapidly under the influence of the southerly winds, I had a rich harvest: for though Compositae, Pedicularis, and a few more of the finer Himalayan plants flower later, June is still the most glorious month for show.
The vegetation at Lachoong was still beautiful, and the weather mild, though snow had descended to 14,000 feet on Tunkra. Compositae were abundantly in flower, apples in young fruit, bushes of Cotoneaster covered with scarlet berries, and the brushwood silvery with the feathery heads of Clematis.
These differences have sometimes been attributed to the pressure of the involucra on the florets, or to their mutual pressure, and the shape of the seeds in the ray-florets of some Compositae countenances this idea; but with the Umbelliferae it is by no means, as Dr. Hooker informs me, the species with the densest heads which most frequently differ in their inner and outer flowers.
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