L.— THE HOP. 
Humulus Lupulus Linne. 
T HOUGH now considered merely a Tribe of the large Family Morace <*>, the 
Hemps and Hops have generally been treated as a distinct Family, the 
Cannab\ne<e. Whilst most of the Morace <e^ the Mulberries, Figs, and Bread-fruits, 
are trees or shrubs with milky latex, the Hemps and Hops are herbaceous and 
have a watery juice. Their leaves are opposite and stipulate, their flowers minute, 
dioecious, pentamerous, and wind-pollinated, their stamens short and straight, and 
their solitary ovules anatropous. 
The Hemp, though frequent as an outcast, has no claim to rank as an 
indigenous species ; but the Hop, though only introduced as a cultivated plant in 
1524, was probably truly wild before that date. 
Turner, in his “ Names of Herbes,” only twenty-four years later, says : — 
u Hoppes do growe by hedges and busshes both set and unset.” 
The origin of Linne’s generic name Humulus is uncertain ; but, derived from 
the Latin humus , the soil, it is suggested as either meaning low or mean, or that the 
long flexile stems would, without a support, lie prostrate. The specific name 
Lupulus , used generically by Brunfels, and, since his time, officinally, means “a little 
wolf,” and comes from Pliny’s “Lupus salictarius,” the “ willow-wolf,” alluding to 
the tenacity with which the rasp-like “ bine ” of the Hop clings to wdlows, or, 
indeed, to any support neither too slender nor too large in girth to permit of 
its twining. 
The Hop is a herbaceous perennial, with a stout, branching rhizome from 
which several aerial stems shoot up annually, rapidly attaining a length of fifteen or 
twenty feet. These are hollow, but are abundantly supplied with tough fibre like 
that of the allied Hemp, while their angularity and small hooked or anvil-shaped 
prickles give them a good grip of the support around which they twine by 
circumnutation. The long apical internodes swing round from left to right, or 
“ counter-clockwise,” on an average once in two hours and eight minutes. In the 
process the stem becomes repeatedly twisted on itself. The opposite leaves are 
stalked, cordate, coarsely-serrate, and palmately 3 — 5-lobed, bearing a general 
resemblance to those of the Grape-vine, but rough, especially on their under 
surfaces. They have two large membranous, interpetiolar stipules, which show 
by a notch at the apex that each consists of two connate ones belonging the one to 
one leaf and the other to the other. Some of the upper leaves may be unlobed. 
The staminate flowers are borne in a much-branched, drooping, axillary, 
paniculate inflorescence, the plant that bears them being known in country parlance 
as a “ seeder,” a producer, that is, not of what the botanist terms seed, but of 
pollen. Each little flower consists of five small oblong, concave, obtuse, free 
