124 . BOTANY. 
plum, cherry, or peach is a drupe! Fruits of this kind, popularly called — 
stone-fruits, have one seed, or sometimes two seeds, surrounded by a hard — 
shell, and around this is a fleshy covering. A berry is a fruit having the 
fonds amidst a fleshy or pulpy mass, as in the gooseberry and currant. 
The grape, the orange, lemon, &c.,, and the melon, cucumber, &c., 
afford examples of kinds of fruit closely allied to the true berry. A 
pod or legume* is a dry fruit, opening along two edges, so as to 
split into two halves, to which the seeds are attached. The name 
pod is also often given to the szlique,? which differs from the legume in 
having a central piece, from which the valves part when the fruit is ripe, 
leaving the seeds attached to it, as may be seen in the kale, the turnip, 
the wall-flower, and all the large order of plants to which these belong. 
A capsule* is a dry fruit, which assumes a very great variety of forms in 
different plants, and sometimes opens along its whole length by valves, 
sometimes along part of its length from the top, so that, when open, 
it is toothed ; sometimes by pores, as in the case of the poppy already 
noticed ; and sometimes by throwing off a lid. A nutis a dry one-seeded 
fruit, with a hard shell which does not open. 
Seed.—A seed usually consists of a nucleus or kernel, protected by 
integuments. The nucleus is often entirely formed of the embryo destined 
to become a new plant; and in this case, the whole store of matter neces- 
sary for the nourishment of the young plant in the commencement of its 
growth is contained in the embryo itself; but in many seeds there is a 
separate store of matter for this purpose, called the albumen,’ which also 
forms part of the nucleus. The presence or absence of the albumen is a 
distinguishing character of many kinds of plants. The albumen is some- 
times so large that the embryo forms only a small part of the seed ; 
sometimes it is horny and hard, as in the vegetable ivory, a species of 
palm ; sometimes it is farinaceous, as in wheat and other corn-plants ; 
sometimes it is rich in oil, asin the poppy. The structure of the embryo 
itself does not depend upon the presence or absence of albumen. When 
we take off the integument of a pea or of a bean, seeds that have no 
albumen, the embryo is at once fully exposed to view, and we find it to 
consist of two lobes, united together at one point, from which the radicle 
and the plumule are to spring, the same point that the seed itself grew 
from, and by which it was attached to the parent plant. These lobes are 
called seed-leaves or cotyledons ® (a, a, fig. 72, page 108), and in some plants, 
1 From Greek drupetés, quite ripe, from drys, a tree, and pipto, to fall. 
2 Latin Jegumen, from lego, to gather, so called because the seeds are gathered or attached to 
only one suture or seam, 
8 Latin siligua, a pod. 
4 Latin capsula, a little case, diminutive of capsa, a case. 
5 A substance like the white of an egg, from Latin albus, white. 
6 Greek, ‘a cup-shaped leaf,’ from Kotylé, a cup. 

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