Page:Journal of botany, British and foreign, Volume 34 (1896).djvu/31

 PENTASACHME WALL. AND SPILADOOORYS RIDL. 16 between them. Ovaries, with such a canal at the top, Linnseus,* Delarbre,! Withering,! and Wydler§ have noticed; these I hope to discuss in a second paper. We may sum up the abnormalities as follows : — 36 flowers abnormal in number of sepals. 37 ,, „ „ „ petals. 85 „ „ ,, ,, stamens. 38 ,, ,, ,, ,, staminodes. 479 „ ,, ,, ,, carpels. 6 ,, exhibiting abnormal metamorphoses. 7 ,, ,, ,, forms of cohesion and adhesion. I wish particularly to lay stress upon the great variability of the ovary, and will add here that flowers on the same root were observed to possess three and four carpels, or four and five carpels; and that among the few flowers examined above 700 ft. in the Grampians, I find the same free variability — both increase and decrease in the number of parts — as at Scarborough. PENTASACHME Wall. AND SPILADOOORYS Ridl. By R. Schlechter. The genus Pentasachme (or, as spelt by Bentham in the Genera Plantarum, vol. ii. p. 769, Pentasacme) was founded by Wallich in 1834, and published by Wight in his Contnbiitions to the Botany of India, p. 60, where two species, P. Wallicliii Wight and P. caudata Wall., are described. The former was figured in one of the wonderfully executed plates of Riocreux in Delessert's Icones SelectfE (v. t. 87). In 1843 Decaisne, when writing his Monograph of the Asclepiads for DC. Prodromus, accepted the genus, and gave descriptions of the two species (p. 627), but unfortunately added two more from China, which, as neither of the type-specimens had flowers, will most likely always remain doubtful. Ten years later Bentham published iu Hooker's Kew Journ. Bot. v. 54, another species, P. Championi, which had been collected by Champion in Hong Kong. The distinctions, however, between his plant and P. caudata were so slight that the learned author himself suggested the possibility of its being only a variety of the latter, and repeated the same suspicion in describing the plant in the Flora Hong- kongensis. t Flore de la ci-devant Auvergne, 2nd ed., Eiom, 1800, i. p. 293. The account of the pollination given here is interesting, because it ignores so markedly C. K. Sprengel's more correct account in his Entdeckte Geheimniss d. Natur, in Bau u in Befruchtung d. Blumen. I Botanical Arrangement of British Plants, 2nd. ed., 1787, Birmingham, i. p. 325. § ' Morphologische Beitrage,' loc. dt.
 * Avwenitates Academica, vi., Leyden, 1764, p. 301,