The Coriander. 105 



tritious, as well as slightly aperient ; but taken as they often are, 

 in inordinate quantities, they sometimes produce a great deal of 

 mischief. The class of fruits to which it belongs, are apt to 

 disagree, on account of their acidity. 



The Coriander, 



The Coriander belongs to the Umbelliferae, one of the most 

 decided natural orders which every one is familiar with, and 

 which is easily known by the umbrella-like manner in which the 

 flower-stalks are disposed. In this order the calyx is entire or 

 five-toothed ; the petals and stamens are five ; the pistils two, 

 and the ripe germen or fruit always separable perpendicularly 

 into two seeds, variously shaped, hanging from the top of a 

 central, thread-shaped, often cloven receptacle. The flowers are 

 disposed in umbels, and these agaiti generally subdivided, each 

 either with an involucrum or without, and in most instances 

 regular, though in some anomalous. The stem is herbaceous, 

 rarely shrubby ; leaves alternate, for the most part repeatedly 

 compound,'rarely simple; footstalks sheathing ; the flowers white 

 or purplish, sometimes yellow. These are Dr. Smith's charac- 

 teristics, who also tells us that botanists in general shrink from 

 the study of this order ; nor have these plants much beauty in 

 the eyes of amateurs, but they will repay the trouble of a care- 

 ful observation. The late M. Cusson, of Montpelier, bestowed 

 more pains on them than any other botanist has ever done, but 

 the world has as yet been favored with only a part of his re- 

 marks ; his labors having met with a most ungrateful check in 

 the unkindness and mortifying stupidity of his wife, who, hi his 

 absence from home, is recorded to have destroyed his whole 

 herbarium, scraping off the dried specimens for the sake of the 

 paper on which they were pasted ! 



The generic name, Coriandrum, is derived either from two 

 words, signifying the pupil of a man's eye, on account of the 

 roundness of the seed, or from another, meaning a bug, be- 

 cause of the nauseating bug-like odor of the fresh plant. Its 

 characteristics are : corolla rayed ; petals inflexed, emarginate ; 



