bit
when broken, or a confused assemblage of ill-defined crystals.
Loaf-sugar and statuary-marble have a _crystalline_ texture.
Sugar-candy and calcareous spar are crystallized.

CUPRIFEROUS. Copper-bearing. _Etym._, _cuprum_, copper, and _fero_,
to bear.

CYCADEAE. A small and very anomalous order of flowering plants,
chiefly found in Mexico, the East Indian Islands, South Africa, and
Australia. They are Gymnogens as to ovules, and neither Exogens nor
Endogens in the wood of their short, simple, or branched trunks, and
they have dicotyledonous seeds. The leaves are pinnated (like those
of cocoa-nut palms), and when young are rolled inwards as in Ferns.
The wood fibres are curiously perforated, and marked, by which they
are recognized in a fossil state as well as by the trunk and
foliage, and the cones, which contain the male flowers. The term is
derived from [Greek: kykas], _cycas_, a name applied by the ancient
Greek naturalist Threophrastus to a palm.

CYPERACEAE. A tribe of plants answering to the English sedges; they
are distinguished from grasses by their stems being solid, and
generally triangular, instead of being hollow and round. Together
with _Gramineae_, they constitute what writers on botanical geography
often call _glumaceae_.

DEBACLE. A great rush of waters, which, breaking down all opposing
barriers, carries forward the broken fragments of rocks, and spreads
them in its course. _Etym._, _dabacler_, French, to unbar, to break
up as a river does at the cessation of a long-continued frost.

DELTA. When a great river, before it enters the sea, divides into
separate streams, they often diverge and form two sides of a
triangle, the sea being the base. The land included by the three
lines, and which is invariably alluvial, was first called, in the
case of the Nile a delta, from its resemblance to the letter of the
Greek alphabet which goes by that name [Greek: D]. Geologists
apply the term to alluvial land formed by a river at its mouth,
without reference to its precise shape.

DENUDATION. The carrying away by the action of running water of a
portion of the solid materials of the land, by which inferior rocks
are laid bare. _Etym._, _denudo_, to lay bare.

DEOXIDIZED, DEOXIDATED. Deprived of oxygen. Disunited from oxygen.

DESICCATION. The art of drying up. _Etym._, _