Page:Curtis's Botanical Magazine, Volume 58 (1831).djvu/254

 beautifully fringed with hairs. The inside, which contains a watery fluid and entraps many insects, especially ants, is clouded with dark purple. The mouth is contracted, horse-shoe-shaped, annulated and crested with several deep, sharp, vertical annuli, of a dark purple colour, smallest near the base of the lid, three of them, which are opposite the wings, larger than the adjoining ones; all of them forming a sickle-shaped point in the mouth. Lid planoconvex, green without and a little hairy, within clouded with purple, marked with broad veins which are somewhat dichotomous, the margin scalloped;—at first it closes the mouth of the ascidium, and afterwards becomes nearly erect. Scape one to nearly two feet high, erect, terete, downy, bearing a compound, spicate raceme at the extremity, and one or two subulate bracteæ in its lower half. Branches very short, downy. Calyx small, hairy, greenish-white, deeply five-cleft, the segments ovate, erecto-patent, obtuse, the points thickened: the base or tube within has a thickened green disc, covered with small papillæ, at the margin of which the twelve stamens, alternately shorter, are inserted: all shorter than the calyx segments; those opposite the calyx-segments longest. Filaments subulate, purplish rose-coloured, glabrous. Anthers two-celled, didymous, subglobose, in part concealed by a large fungose, globose excrescence (the connectivum); those of the longer filiments rather the largest. Pollen globose. Pistils six, small, arranged in a circle around a small tuft of hairs, purplish. Germen ovate, glabrous, tapering into a somewhat recurved style: Stigma obtuse. "Ovule erect, almost as large as the cell, and containing within the membranaceous testa a little, pendulous sack, of the same size as the cavity of the testa." (Br.)

by