The berries after drying are spherical and about one-fifth of an inch in diameter and are wrinkled on the surface, indistinctly pointed below by the remains of a very short pedical and crowned by three or four lobed stigmas. The thin pericarp tightly encloses a single seed, the embryo of which, on account of the premature gathering is not fully developed and is replaced by the cavity below the apex. The seed itself contains within the thin red-brown testa a shining albumen of angular, radically arranged, large-celled parenchyme, gray and horny without and mealy within. The transverse section of a grain of pepper exhibits a soft, yellowish epidermis covering; the outer pericarp is formed of a closely packed yellow layer of large and most radically arranged thick-walled cells, most of which are colorless and loaded with starch; others contain a soft, yellowish, amorphous mass, each containing in its minute cavity a quantity of dark-brown resin, while the middle layer of the pericarp consists of starch and oil, the shrinkage of which causes the deep wrinkles on the surface of the berry. The next inner layer of the pericarp exhibits its circumference tangentially arranged soft parenchyme, the cells of which possess either spiral striation or spiral fibers, but towards the interior lose parenchyme free from starch and containing very large oil cells. The testa is formed in the first place of a row of small yellowish thick-walled cells, next to which follows the true testa as a dense, dark-brown layer of lignified cells, the individual outlines of which are indistinguishable. If thin slices are kept under glycerine for some time these masses are slowly transformed into needle-shaped crystals of piperine. The angular cells of the interior of the seed are, of course, the more prominent and, when once seen, their characteristic form and contents are easily recognized again. The structure of the outer coats is made out with more difficulty, and before attempting to do so on ground pepper it is best to soften some whole black and white pepper corns in glycerine and cut sections from various parts of the exterior of the berry.