V THE BULRUSH. 
Typha lati folia Linne. 
S OME of the groups in which plants are classified are apparently linked by 
intermediate forms, or do not recommend themselves equally to all students 
of plant-anatomy. Among living plants, however, the enclosure of the ovule in an 
ovary and the reception of the pollen-grains on a special viscid surface or stigma 
seem to mark out a great natural Division, the Angiosperms , separating them from 
the group of Gymnosperms , some types of which we have just described. Among the 
Angiosperms two natural Classes are so clearly defined by characters drawn from 
every part of the plant that the distinction between Monocotyledons and Dicoty- 
ledons was long ago recognised by John Ray and other early botanists. Though 
there are exceptional cases, it will be sufficient here to say that in Monocotyledons 
the primary or tap-root is not as a rule developed, its place being taken by a bunch 
of unbranched fibrous rootlets ; that if the stem is perennial it will develop scattered 
“woody bundles” in its interior but not annual rings of wood ; and that, as it does 
not increase in diameter by means of a cambium , or layer of growing tissue, below 
the bark, there is no readily removable bark ; that the leaves are usually simple, 
exstipulate, entire, and parallel-veined, and very often highly polished and glossy ; 
that the parts of the flowers are very often in whorls of three ; and that, as the 
name indicates, there is only one fully-formed cotyledon or seed-leaf in the embryo 
plant within the seed. 
The Class includes, in addition to the groups here represented, the Grasses and 
Sedges, and such exotic Families as the Palms, Screw-pines, Bananas, Gingers, and 
Arrow-roots. 
The Order Pandanales , named from Pandanus , the Screw-pines, includes two 
British Families, the Typhace <e and the Sparganiaceu: , its chief general characters being 
that the flowers have either no perianth or one reduced to uniform hairs or bracts, 
and are collected into closely crowded spherical or cylindrical inflorescences, with 
stamens and carpels in separate flowers, and that the embryo is surrounded in the 
seed by the food-store known as albumen. 
The Family Typhace <e is but a small one, containing only the one genus Typha , 
of which there are about a dozen species, widely distributed over the Tropical and 
Temperate regions of the globe, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. Growing as 
they do in marshes or by the side of stagnant or running waters, they derive their 
generic name Typha from the Greek rvpos, tuphos, a marsh. 
Buried in the mud are the thick creeping stems or rhizomes which are filled 
with a store of starch with, however, an astringent taste that has led to their use in 
Eastern Asia for medicinal purposes. From them are given off many thick roots, 
and the erect, wand-like, cylindrical, aerial stem, from the lower part of which alone 
are leaves given offi The leaves are sword-shaped, rising erect in two vertical rows, 
narrow in proportion to their length and sheathing at the base ; and, as is the rule 
