| pastures. 
| men’s annual lists of Dutch roots. 
908 CROWN-IMPERIAL. 
Its leaves are medicinally used in the same man- 
ner and for the same purposes as those of the 
flame spearwort crowfoot. A double-flowered 
variety of British origin, and two varieties, called 
the wood and the many-cleft, from continental 
Kurope, are cultivated as ornaments of the flower- 
border.—The noxious crowfoot, Ff. sceleratus, is a 
poisonous, cut-leaved, yellow-flowered, two-feet- 
high annual, of waste grounds in both England 
and Scotland.—The creeping crowfoot, 2. repens, 
is a low, creeping, perennial-rooted, cut-leaved, 
yellow-flowered weed, of British meadows and 
It blooms through nearly all the sum- 
mer and through part of autumn; and a double- 
flowered variety of it has long had a place in 
flower-gardens.—The hairy crowfoot, 2. hirsutus, 
is an annual weed of about a foot high, growing 
amongst stony rubbish in some parts of England. 
—The blunt-flowered, the ivy-leaved, the water, 
and the all-hairy crowfoots, 2. obtusiflorus, R. he- 
| deraceus, R. aquatilus, and R. pantothrix, are hand- 
| some, white-flowered, floating, perennial aquatics 
_ of ditches and ponds in Britain. 
CROWN-IMPERIAL,—botanically Pritidlaria 
| Imperialis. A hardy, bulbous-rooted, magnificent- 
| ly-flowering plant, of the tulipaceous tribe. It was 
introduced to Britain from Persia toward the close 
_ of the 16th century ; and it occupies a prominent 
place, in almost every flower-garden, as one of the 
most showy and large-featured of florists’ flowers. 
| Its bulb is large, globose, scaly, yellow-coloured, 
_ and powerfully fetid; its stem is herbaceous, succu- 
| lent, of very rapid growth, and about 4 feet high, 
| —its lower and middle parts garnished, on every 
side, with long, narrow, pointed, smooth, entire 
leaves,—its upper part, or about a foot of it to- 
ward the summit, quite naked, and crowned first 
with a massive and most imposing whorl of flow- 
| ers, and next with a terminal and spreading tuft 
of erect, green leaves; and its flowers are pro- 
duced in a whorl or occasionally in two or even 
three whorls of inverted bells,—they are large 
and spreadingly campanulate, and hang upon 
short, bent peduncles which grow at the inter- 
stices of the terminal or crowning tuft of leaves, 
—and each comprises six spear-shaped petals, 
and has at the base of each of these a nectary 
filled with a honeyed liquor, and looking like a 
liquid globular gem. ‘Twelve well-defined va- 
rieties, besides many fugitive ones, were known 
in the days of Miller; and very numerous varie- 
ties, with similar fancy names to those which are 
given to tulips and hyacinths, figure in the seeds- 
“The sort 
with yellow flowers, that with large flowers, and 
those with double flowers,” says Miller, “are the 
most valuable; but that which hath two or three 
| whorls of flowers above each other makes the 
finest appearance, though this seldom produces 
_ its flowers after this manner the first year after 
removing, but the second or third year after 
planting, the stalks will be taller, and frequently 
have three tiers of flowers one above the other, 
CRUCIFEROUS PLANTS. 
which is called the triple crown.” The crown- 
imperial is treated in a similar manner to other 
hardy and unfastidious bulbous-rooted plants, 
but ought not to be removed so often, and re- 
quires to be planted at a depth and distances | 
somewhat proportioned to its greater size. See 
the article Frrvrnary. 
CROWN-SCAB. A disease of the coronet of 
the feet of horses. It consists of an outbreak of 
bad humour round the coronet, accompanied 
with a very sharp itchiness, and followed by the 
formation of scab. A drawing and healing oint- 
ment may be applied, and a dose or two of physic 
given. 
CROWN-VETCH —botanically Coronilla Varia. 
A hardy, herbaceous, perennial-rooted forage 
plant, of the Coronilla genus. It is a native of 
continental HKurope, and was introduced to Bri- 
tain toward the close of the 16th century. Its 
roots have a powerfully creeping habit; its stem 
is smooth and about a yard long, and declines to- 
ward the base when mature; its leaves are com- 
pound, smooth, and long; ard its flowers are pro- 
duced in round heads, and have a variegated 
pink colour, and bloom from July till November. 
This plant loves a warm, dry, light soil, and will 
yield two very large crops of green fodder ina 
season; but it has a bitterish taste, and is not 
much relished by cattle, and is unfitted by the 
excessively creeping habit of its roots for profit- 
able culture on any ground which can be sub- 
jected to ordinary cropping. 
CROZOPHORA. A recently constituted ge- 
nus of plants of the euphorbia tribe. The dyer’s 
species, Crozophora tinctoria, formerly called Cro- 
ton tenctorva, is a small, prostrate, hardy annual, 
and was introduced to Britain from the south of 
Europe in the 16th century. Its stem is slender, 
cylindrical, and about a yard high; its leaves 
are alternate, oval, soft in texture, and curled at 
the edge; its flowers are produced in short clus- 
ters, have a small size and a whitish-green col- 
our, and appear in July; and its fruit droops, 
and comprises three rough, blackish cells. This 
plant resembles the crotons and some other of 
the euphorbiaceze in acrid, emetic, and power- 
fully drastic properties; but it produces the deep 
purple dye called turnsole, and, for the sake of 
this, is cultivated in the district around Mont- 
pelier. Nearly a dozen other species have been 
botanically described. 
CRUCIANELLA. See Crosswort. 
CRUCIFEROUS PLANTS. A very extensive; 
very important, and perfectly natural assemblage 
of plants, constituting the class Tetradynamia in 
the system of Linnzeus, and the order Cruciferse 
in the system of Jussieu. About 2,500 species 
have been scientifically described; and about 
800 of these either grow wild in Britain or have 
been introduced to it from foreign countries. 
Four-fifths of the whole order are distributed 
throughout the temperate regions of the world, 
and are impatient alike of the heat of the tropics 
4 
