ACORUS

(Yunanca köken — orijinale bakınız.) A plant with sv/ord-shapcd leaves and aromatic stems, found abundantly in the meadows of some parts of England. It bears, but very rarely, its flowers in a little greenish yellow spadix, which appears at a short distance below the end of a leaflike scape. The leaves, when crushed, exhale a pleasant odour, and are still used for strewing the floors of churches upon the occasion of certain ancient ceremonies. Its stem, or rhizoma, is like that of an iris, and is the calamus aromatic us of the druggists. ACOTYLEDONS. {Gr.oc, without, and KcnXri^m, literally, a hollow or concave part, but applied by botanists to the seed-lobe.) Plants whose seeds have no distinct cotyledons. The term is usually applied to •what are more' commonly named cryptogamic plants, such as ferns, mo es, lichens, ., in which there are no seeds, properly so called, but which are propagated by undivided spherical bodies called spores. The word acotyledon is occasionally used for such plants as cuscuta, cactus, ., whose seeds, although really of the same nature as those in which cotyledons are usually present, have no obvious division; this mode of applying the term is, however, seldom employed. [s. 24]