Page:London Journal of Botany, Volume 2 (1843).djvu/176

 plant is formed of much divided green branches, from two to three feet high, and interwoven in such a mass as to resemble the flowering branches of Statice Tatarica; the blossoms are numerous, lilac-coloured, and highly fragrant and produced near the ends of the slender branches. The second species differs in having bracteas, which run along the principal stems and terminate in bluntish leaves; this plant is of rather lower growth than the first: the points of the slender branches are triangular, and its blossoms were not expanded. I gathered this latter kind in the vicinity of King George's Sound, and I think you will find specimens of it among my Proteaceæ, in the large box.

During my late expedition to the south of the Vasse, my opportunities of discovering luminous phosphorescent Fungi were rather better than I could have wished. For several days and nights I was incessantly wet to the skin, my lucifer matches incapable of ignition from the damp, and my hands blistered with making a fire after the native fashion; when, one night, after all my efforts to procure a fire had been unavailing, I descried afar off, in the forest, a tree which I imagined must have been set in a blaze by lightning. On making my way to it, I found that the light was produced by a remarkable Agaric, which grew, tier above tier, up the trunk of a dead Eucalyptus occidentalis. The species is different from that which I described in a former letter: the upper surface of the pileus being nearly black in the centre and the gills milk-white. This curious property appears to be not uncommon among those Agarics which have the stem at one side of the pileus, and grow on dead wood."

July 18th, 1842. "Having written to you from Fairlawn, the residence of Captain Molloy, Government-Superintendent of the Vasse District, and given you an account of a few plants which I found principally between the Vasse and Augusta, I now