Word Finder - loculi

definition

A little place or space; a cell; a chamberlet.

definition

In ancient catacombs and tombs of some types, a small separate chamber or recess cut into the rock, for the reception of a body or urn.

definition

One of the spaces between the septa in the Anthozoa.

definition

One of the compartments of a several-celled ovary; loculament.

These loculi were usually constructed for a single body only.

The walls of the compartments are occupied by arched sepulchral recesses, above and below which are tiers of ordinary graves or loculi.

In the upright walls of these galleries loculi were cut as needed to receive the dead.

The mode of interment, however, is the same as that practised in Rome, and the loculi and arcosolia differ by little in the two.

The loculi here also are set endways to the passage.

The original entrance to the cemetery leads directly into a spacious corridor with no loculi, but recesses for sarcophagi, and decorations of the classical style of the 2nd century.

The loculi were intact and the epitaphs still in their places, so that " they form a kind of museum, in which the development, the formulae, and the symbolic figures of Christian epigraphy, from its origin to the end of the 3rd or 4th century, can be notified and contemplated, not in artificial specimens as in the Lateran, but in the genuine and living reality of their original condition."

It had no loculi, but recesses in the wall to receive sarcophagi.

The loculi in this lower portion were intact, with inscriptions of the 2nd century still in their places, proving that the niche in which that picture was painted must have been considerably older than the lowering of the floor.

Near this a whole region of galleries has been brought to light with loculi intact.

These organs may be raised on a short stalk, their cavity subdivided into loculi, and provided in some cases with hooks.

Sometimes the two cavities are restricted to the two ends of the spore, the polaribilocular type and the two loculi may be united From Beitrcge zur Wissenschaftlichen Botanik.

The careful study of the development of the synangium of Tmesipteris, which consists of two loculi, and of Psilotum, which consists of three, has shown that their structure can be explained as originating by the septation of a single sporangium resembling that of Lycopodium.

The anther entire (a) with its filament; section of anther (b) showing the four loculi.

The male sporophylls are similar in form to the vegetative leaves, but smaller; sunk in their parenchyma are numerous tubular loculi, containing large pollen-grains, which are pluricellular like those of Cordaites; the female fructification had not yet been identified with certainty.

The synangia consist of a stout wall composed of thick-walled cells, succeeded by a layer of more delicate and smaller elements; and internal to the wall occur two rows of sporangial loculi containing microspores.

When the synangia are ripe dehiscence takes place along a median line between the two rows of loculi.

But the natural desire to be buried near one's relatives caused new tombs to be cut in the walls, above and around and behind the original tombs, the walls being thus completely honeycombed with loculi, sometimes as many as seventy, utterly regardless of the paintings originally depicted on the walls.

Yet it is in this stratum, and in this alone, that the catacombs are constructed; their engineers avoiding with equal care the solid stone of the tufa litoide and the friable pozzolana, and selecting the stratum of medium hardness, which enabled them to form the vertical walls of their galleries, and to excavate the loculi and cubicula without severe labour and also without fear of their falling in.

The modifications required to strengthen the crumbling walls to support the roof and to facilitate the excavation of loculi, involved so much labour that, as a rule, after a few attempts, the idea of utilizing an old quarry for burial purposes was abandoned.

Cemetery interment became a regular trade in the hands of the fossores, or grave-diggers, who appear to have established a kind of property in the catacombs, and whose greed of gain led to that destruction of the religious paintings with which the walls were decorated, for the quarrying of fresh loculi, to which we have already alluded.