THE CARNATION FAMILY. 



141 



the inner surface. Fruit a one-celled capsule, opening by twice as 

 many teeth or valves as there are styles, with a free central placenta, 

 and numerous seeds, the latter usually embossed with tubercles or 

 embroidered with wavy patterns, and strikingly beautiful when 

 magnified. 



Fig. 109. 

 Eose Lychnis. 



Over a thousand species are known, natives of the temperate and 

 cold parts of both hemispheres, and often creeping to the very edge 

 of perennial snows. Properties they can hardly be said to possess, 

 being remarkable for little but insipidity. The only useful plant 

 of the family is the soap-wort, which, when bruised and agitated in 

 water, raises a lather like soap, available in some degree for washing. 



Sixty grow wild in England, and twenty-four of them near Man- 

 chester, many being weeds and inconspicuous ; but the larger kinds, 

 especially the different species of Lychnis and Stellaria, contributing 

 abundantly, in early summer, to the floral gaiety of our woods and 

 hedgerows. The white Lychnis and the rose Lychnis are remarkable 

 for their unisexual flowers. As with other families, they may be 

 divided into white-flowered and red-flowered. The former immensely 

 preponderate ; and though white varieties of the second section appear 

 occasionally, others of the normal colour are always close by, and 

 shew to which division they really belong. 



