Teazle

Teazle (Dipsacus), a small genus of prickly biennial plants, natives of Europe and Northern Asia, which give their name to the gamopetalous order Dipsaceae. The opposite cauline leaves in some species are connate, holding rain-water. The flowers are in globular or oblong capitula, opening both centrifugally and centripetally, and each flower is furnished with an involucel of long prickly scales. D. fullonum, the fuller's teazle, cultivated in France, Austria, and to some extent in the Vest of England, is, perhaps, only a variety of the wild British species D. sylvestris, from which it differs in its recurved involucel-scales. These scales are just sufficiently rigid and just sufficiently elastic to raise an even pile on cloth, and the heads are consequently fixed in rows in a frame to form part of the fuller's gig-mill or dressing-machine, no wire-cards yet introduced having proved equally effective. We import about 20 millions yearly.