THE WICKED BUTTERCUP.

Otago Witness, Issue 2734, 8 August 1906, Page 6

THE WICKED BUTTERCUP.

When among the grasses of the virgin plains of America a buttercup blazes golden the redskin calls it the "print of white man's foot." Wherever the white man goes, says a writer in the Daily Telegraph, he take 3 with him fodder, and among the hay or the oats lurk seeds of the buttercup. The days when the buttercup trots its name because it was supposed to make the butter yellow, or (authorities differ) because cows were supposed to like it are long past. Cows like buttercups about as much a* Smike liked brimstone and treacle. rr hose flowers of gold give indigestion. In which there seems matter for an allegory. Creatures of less susceptible stomachs than the cow — sheep, for instance, or deer — will devour the buttercups without a qualm, while it is understood that to the turkey buttercups are actually a delicacy. A turkey, it you will consider, looks, the debauchee all over. The frequency of buttercups is, however, most distressing to the farmer who commonly desires to provide a menu, not for the turkey, but for the cow. The Field, complaining that "the worthless and objectionable buttercup . . . seems to

ho exceptionally bountiful this -season," laments that there is "no known specific method of treatment which tha farmer may adopt for its suppression." A proposal to employ the appetite of turkeys for its suppression is discouraged by the Field with the remark that "this system could only he applicable on a limited scale, for if it were to become general «a great part of the country would be devoted to the precarious pursuit of turkey-reariSg." On the whole, in the contest of farajjjkrv. buttercup, the impartial -mind is inclined to back the buttercup. It is obtrusive and it is a nuisances-two qualities which always make for survival. The buttercup belongs tt a family of rather disagreeable plants. They are all acrid and bitter, and some of them worse. One of the family produces a Juice which was used to poison arrow points. . Another, Tejoicing in the apt name af "Ranunculus soeleratus" ("the rascal ranunculus") was, and perhaps still is, used by beggars in England to produce blisters oiid superficial sores to excite the compassion and benefactions of the charitable. In fact, the buttercup is a criminal of a. erinanal jamily. But, as the wicked too often are, it is undeniably prepossessing. If it were eliminated, if our meadows became the home of nothing but virtue and nourishing grasses;" they would be much less good to look at than they are now, spangled ■sriih the golden flowers^of. the wicked. In fact,', if the wicked^ were all gone the meadow* niight be a,, trifle dull.- And^^bat, pcrhdpsv is~"4n\*flegbry J"foo. K » *rhej» i§j however ,/nb- caiise fetf .despondency-.^ Neither from the. meadows nor the worfd are the wicked likely lb 'be "el&ninated just yet. ' ■ ♦ - "A- M. M points out in a letter to the Daily Telegrapn that a flock of "geese would •oon rid a meadow of buttercups, roots and all. ' " A M." bar an idea, too, that pigs vril" also do much towards exterminating them,' ■ -