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L I C H E N pyxidatus.
Common Cup Lichen.
CRYPTOGAMIA Alga;.
Gen. Char. Male, scattered warts.
Female, smooth shields or tubercles, in which the
seeds are imbedded.
Spec. Char. Cup-shaped, leathery, greyish-green, scaly,
often proliferous. Cups dilated, nearly entire.
Tubercles brown. Leaves minutes, imbricated, cre-
nate.
Syn. Lichen pyxidatus. Linn. Sp. PI. 1619. Achar.
Prod. 186. Huds.551. u - y . With. v. 4. 36.
Hull. 303. Relh. 469. Sibth. 332. Abbot. 268,
n. 900 and 901.
Lichenoides tubulosum pyxidatum cinereum. Raii Syn.
63. .
Baeomyces pyxidatus. Achar. Meth. 337.
Coralloides scyphiforme, tuberculis fuscis. Dill. Muse.
79. t. 14. f . 6 .
T h is most common kind of cup-bearing Lichen is generally
called Cup-Moss, under which name it is famous as a cure for
the hooping cough. Nothing can be .more easily procured
in heathy somewhat shady places, where it commonly forms
broad hoarjr perennial patches of minute imbricated lobed
leaves, of a greyish green when wet, almost white when dry.
Copious thick tubular stems arise from among the leaves,
various in height, each dilated at the summit into a pretty
regular and entire cup, all of the same colour, whose margin in
due time bears numerous brown tubercles on short stalks.
Very often these marginal stalks become as long and thick as
the parent stem, and bear tubercles in proportion; more rarely
they bear other cups, whose edges are again and again proliferous
: still more unfrequently it happens that the centres of
all the cups are repeatedly proliferous.