SCITAMINE.E 569 



its place as a store of reserve-material. In Musa Ensete ! the 

 sucker has a broad disc-like shape ; its epidermis is an absorbent 

 epithelium of palisade-like cells, and in this as well as in its 

 somewhat peripheral position with regard to the reserve- 

 material it resembles the scutellum of Grasses. The whole 

 bluish-green embryo is thus knob-like or rather fungoid in 

 shape, the knob or cap being the sucker and the stalk the 

 embryo proper terminating in the radicle. In germination the 

 radicle elongates, pushes out the stopper in the seed-coat and 

 emerges followed by the well-developed plumule. Connection 

 is kept up with the sucker which remains in the seed, and 

 increases considerably in size until the perisperm is exhausted 

 and the seedling by developing green leaves has become inde- 

 pendent. 



BROMELIACE^E. 



Benth. et Hook. Gen. PL iii. 657. 



Fruit and Seed. The three-celled ovary is inferior in the 

 tribe Bromelieae, half inferior in the Pitcairnieae, and superior 

 in the Puyese and Tillandsiese. The ovules are anatropous and 

 usually very numerous when the fruit becomes capsular, or 

 few when a berry is produced. The curvature is mostly towards 

 the free side, the ovules in the upper part of the ovary being 

 turned upwards (epitropous), those near the base downwards 

 (apotropous), the rest usually apotropous, or turned sideways 

 (pleurotropous). The placentas are often provided with 

 palisade-like mucilage-cells (^Echmea, Portea), and this ob- 

 tains more or less in all genera with pulpy berries. As in 

 many Monocotyledons, we find in the dividing walls of the 

 ovary-cells, clefts lined with honey-secreting cells, the so- 

 called septal glands. 



The fruit is baccate in the Bromeliege where the ovary 

 is inferior, sometimes almost leathery (^Echmea, Billbergia), 

 in the other tribes it is a capsule. In Ananas (the Pineapple), 

 the axis, bracts and fruits are all fleshy and united into a 



1 Wittmack, ' Musa Ensete,' Linntza, 35, taf. iii. 



