CITPULIYERE (i.e., cupule-bearing), or a natural order of exogenous plants, consisting of trees and shrubs, natives of temperate climates. The leaves are alternate and furnished with stipules. The male flowers, and sometimes also the female flowers, are disposed in catkins (and this order is regarded by many botanists as a sub order of amentacete, q. v.); the stamens are 5 to 20, inserted into the base of scales or of a membranous perianth; the ovary is crowned by the rudiments of a persistent perianth, and surrounded by a cupule (q. v.) of various figure; there are several cells and ovules, but the greater part of the ovules are abortive; the fruit is a 1-celled nut, more or less. inclosed in the cupule; the seed is usually solitary; the embryo large, with fleshy cotyledons and minute superior radicle.—This order contains many of the most important trees of Europe and America, including all the different kinds of oak, beech, chestnut, and hazel, the hornbeam, etc. Many species are also natives of tropical countries, but they are there only found at considerable elevations.
CUR (Welsh cor, a dwarf, anything small; comma, a small river; corgi, a small dog), a name sometimes applied indiscriminately to small dogs of any kind not highly valued, and in this way often particularly appropriated to dogs of mongrel breed, but also used by naturalists as the common designation of many races, of which the terriers (q.v.) may be considered as the type; all of them of small size, and exhibiting in a high degree the capacity for domestication, along with activity and sagacity. These races are distributed over all parts of the world, and differ very considerably from each other, and are found domesticated even among very rude and savage tribes. The Pariah dog of India is reckoned among them, and exists in that country both in a wild and in a domesticated state; its body is more lank than that of the cur races of Europe, a character which is also in some measure exhibited by the dogs that haunt the streets of towns in Turkey, Persia, etc. The curs may, not improbably, have been the first domesticated dogs.