liverworts's Usage Examples:

In the Lower Carboniferous of Scotland Mr Kidston has found several specimens of a large dichotomous thallus, with a very distinct midrib; the specimens, referred to the provisional genus Thallites, much resemble the larger thalloid Liverworts.

The excluded genera are distributed among the liverworts, lichens and fungi; but notwithstanding the great advance in knowledge since the time of Linnaeus, the difficulty of deciding what limits to assign to the group to be designated Algae still remains.

ACOTYLEDONES, the name given by Antoine Laurent de Jussieu in 1789 to the lowest class in his Natural System of Botany, embracing flowerless plants, such as ferns, lycopods, horse-tails, mosses, liverworts, sea-weeds, lichens and fungi.

The plants showing it are not all forest trees, hut include also some Pteridophytes and some of the prothallia of the Ferns, Club-mosses, Liverworts and Horsetails.

The gametophyte, which bears the sexual organs, is either a free-living thallus corresponding in degree of differentiation with the lower liverworts, or it is a mass of cells which always remains enclosed in a spore and is parasitic upon the sporophyte.

In the liverworts we find fixation of the thallus by water-absorbing rhizoids; in certain forms with a localized region of water-absorption the development of a primitive hydrom or water-conducting system; and in others with rather a massive type of thallus the differentiation of a special assimilative and transpiring system.

Opposed to the thalloid forms are the group of leafy Liverworts (Acrogynae), whose plant-body consists of a thin supporting stem bearing leaves.

The sporogonium of the liverworts is in the simpler forms simply a spore-capstile with arrangements for the development, protection and distribution of the spores.

A sufficient description of the thallus of the liverworts will be found in the article BRYOIHYTA.

The Mosses and Liverworts include forms with a more or less leaf-like thallus, such as many of the liverworts, and forms in which the plant shows a differentiation into a stem bearing remarkably simple leaves, as in the true mosses.

Synonyms:

class Hepaticopsida, hepatic, Hepaticopsida, scale moss, Hepaticae, hornwort, Marchantia polymorpha, hepatica, leafy liverwort, bryophyte, nonvascular plant, class Hepaticae,