SCURVY-GRASS— continued. 
ovary with a single short style and a bifurcate stigma. Placentation is parietal ; but 
a membranous ingrowth, or septum^ from the two antero-posterior placentas extends 
across the ovary, making it two-chambered. This septum persists, when the fruit 
bursts, as a transparent membrane framed by the persistent placentas or replum. 
The fruit is dry and usually dehiscent into two valves from below upwards ; 
but in a few cases transversely between the seeds ; or, in some one-seeded cases, not 
at all. It is generally compressed, either in a direction parallel to the septum so that 
the latter is narrowed {an^ustisept), or at right angles to it so that it is wide {latisept). 
If three times as long as it is broad the fruit is termed a siliqua ; if shorter, a silicula. 
In the subdivision of this very “natural” Family the embryo also affords 
important characters. The seed is exalbuminous, and the radicle may be incumbent., 
i.e. bent back along the centre line of one cotyledon ; accumbent, or resting against the 
edges of the two cotyledons ; orthoplocous, when the cotyledons are folded in a 
conduplicate manner ; spirolobous, when the radicle is incumbent but the cotyledons 
are bent once upon themselves ; or diplocolobous, when they are bent twice or more. 
A recent subdivision of the Family is based upon the presence of unbranched hairs 
upon the leaves or branched ones with some glandular ones. 
The genus Cochlearia, the name of which, derived from the Latin cochlear, 
a spoon, refers to the shape of the root-leaves of some species, includes some five- 
and-twenty perennial herbaceous plants, natives of alpine, Arctic, and Temperate 
regions and especially of the coast. They have small white or pink flowers with 
entire petals and short globose pods with inflated convex valves, a septum across 
their wider diameter, and two rows of seeds in each chamber. The cotyledons are 
accumbent. There are several British species, all of them variable, so much so, in 
fact, that Syme proposed the name polymorpha to include those now known as 
C. officinalis Linne, C. alpina Watson, and C. danica Linne. 
Cochlearia officinalis Linne owes its specific name, as also its popular name of 
Scurvy-grass, to its use as an antiscorbutic. The fleshy leaves are characteristic of 
its littoral habitat, the lower radical ones being round or kidney-shaped, cordate, and 
long-stalked, while the upper or cauline ones are sessile, amplexicaul, and angular or 
lobed. The plant flowers from May to August : the style is very short, and there 
are from four to six large seeds in each chamber of the fruit. These seeds are 
covered with large mucilaginous tubercles which absorb water and swell up to many 
times their original size, probably serving to fix the seed on the soil. 
