XYLOPIA, a genus of anonaceous trees or shrubs, natives of tropical regions, with coria ceous leaves, commonly two-ranked, and flowers in realsry dusters or solitary. The corollas have six petals, the outer three elon gated, boat-shaped, curving over and partially enclosing the other three. The receptacle it conical, with the stamens outside and the car pels in its excavated interior. The fruits are elongated berries. X. sericea, the pindaiba of Rio Janeiro, bears a highly aromatic fruit, which may be used as pvwr, with which it agrees in flavor. Good cordage is made from the fibres of its bark. The wood, bark and berries of X. plabra, the 'bitter wood' of the West Indies, taste like orange seeds, and im part a similar flavor to the wild pigeons which feed on them. It is said to be useful in co& and for creating an appetite. Manias believes the fruit of X. grainfiflora to constitute a valu able febrifuge used by the South America. Indians. The dry, black and quill-Ida fruits of X. aromatica form the Piper ethioticsai of commerce, used as pepper by the West African negroes. They are sold in the native market as a stimulant and condiment X. polycarpa is the yellow dye-tree of tropical Africa, with a bitter bark, that contains berberint and which yields a yellow dye, of extensive use; it is also employed for the treatment of bad ulcers, 25th letter of the English alphabet, derived from the Greek through the Latin, is both vowel and consonant. It came into Latin in Cicero's time in wiling words borrowed from the Greek; for the Latin language has no sound like that of the Greek T (upsilon); the y found in some Latin words, as iareynso, ssayra. sylva, is due to an er ror of modern editors; those words were in ancient Latin always written lacrinea, satira, nhsi. The modern Italian alphabet has no y, and the y of Greek words adapted into Italian is changed to i: sinforila, symphony, sindico, nadir. In Dutch, y stands for and rep resents the diphthonal long i of English as is time. In English, y is a superfluous letter, so
far as it stands for a vowel sound; as such, it can always be represented by the vowel i. The sound of T, v, in Greek, was that of French and German I. This sound does not exist in English: it is heard when, with lips and tongue in the positions for pronouncing the vowel sound oo, one tries to give the English vowel sound of e in ht. In early English or Anglo Saxon, y represented this peculiar vowel sound; hut it has so far dropped out of English speech that a person whose only speech is English can not pronounce it untaught. At the time of the Norman Conquest i had taken the place of this r, and soon both the sound and the letter went out of English use. But when Norman words came to be used by the English the French u sound was retained in many words, as 111111C, lute, duke, and they were pronounced with the French a; this sound gradually developed into no, but the spelling remained unchanged: this in represents the sound of r in mut, duke as now pronounced. In the beginning of syllables and when followed by a vowel, y is a palatal con sealant formed by bringing the middle of the tongue in contact with the palate, nearly in the position for g hard; hence Old-English g hard has often been softened into y, as in day from Old-English dog. Y also often stands for the sound pronounced in the same manner but writ ten j in the other Germanic tongues. Until com paratively recent times it was customary to write the r and that yt, and those forms were repeated in typography. In those cases the character resembling y or identical with it, stood, not for y but for the Old-English letter it is a mere ignorantism to read sy• year,' ye year as though y here stood for the con sonant y, and not for the digraph sh As an abbreviation Y stands for yttrium. Y is used in mathematics for the second of two unknown quantities or the ordinate of a point in Carte SUM co-ordinates, See ALPII MITT