parasites, or with that other curious sort of plants known as saprophytes, which live upon decaying living matter in the mould of forests. As they need no green leaves, but have often inherited leafy structures of some sort, in a more or less degenerate condition, from their self-supporting ancestors, they usually display most beautiful colours in their stems and scales, and several of them rank amongst our handsomest hot-house plants. Even the dodder has red stalks. Their only work in life being to elaborate the materials stolen from their host into the brilliant pigments used in the petals for attracting insect fertilisers, they pour this same dye into the stems and scales, which thus render them still more conspicuous to the insects' eyes. Moreover, as they use their whole material in producing flowers, many of these are very large and handsome; one huge Sumatran species has a blossom which measures three feet across. On the other hand, their seeds are usually small and very numerous. Thousands of seeds must fall on unsuitable places, spring up, and waste all their tiny store of nourishment, find no host at hand on which to fasten themselves, and so die down for want of food. It is only by producing a few thousand young plants for every one destined ultimately to survive that dodders and broomrapes manage to preserve their types at all. XIV. _DOG'S MERCURY AND PLANTAIN._ The hedge and bank in Haye Lane are now a perfect tangled mass of creeping plants, among which I have just picked out a queer little three-cornered flower, hardly known even to village children, but christened by our old herbalists 'dog's mercury.' It is an ancient trick of language to call coarser or larger plants by the specific title of some smaller or cultivated kind, with the addition of an animal's name. Thus we have radish and horse-radish, chestnut and horse-chestnut, rose and dog-rose, parsnip and cow-parsnip, thistle and sow-thistle. On the same principle, a somewhat similar plant being known as mercury, this perennial weed becomes dog's mercury. Both, of course, go back to some imaginary medicinal virtue in the herb which made it resemble the metal in the eyes of old-fashioned practitioners.