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 300 OBSERVATIONS ON THE NATURAL FAMILY

The third species, Galea pinifolia, is adopted from Forster's Florulae Insularum Australium Prodromus.

The specimen of this plant in George Forster's Herba- rium (now forming part of the extensive collection of Mr. Lambert) is very imperfect ; it evidently, however, belongs to the same species with a more complete specimen received, without a name, from Forster by Sir Joseph Banks, in whose Herbarium I have examined it, and ascer- tained that it has a naked receptacle. It therefore cannot be a species of Galea, which I have no~ doubt Forster con- sidered it merely from a certain degree of resemblance to his Galea leptopthylla. From the structure of its stigmata, antherse, and involucrum, Calea pinifolia belongs, indeed, to a very different tribe, and might even be referred to Gnaphalium as it at present stands. But this extensive and ill-defined genus evidently requires reformation ; and 122] if the necessity for its subdivision be admitted, it Avill also, I believe, be found most expedient to apply the name Gnaphalium to that section to which G. luteo-album, syl- vaticum, and uliginosum belong, and which is characterised by its naked receptacle, its involucrum connivent at top and of equal height with the truncated capitulum, which consists of numerous filiform female florets in the circum- ference, with a smaller number of hermaphrodite florets in the disk, both of them ripening seeds and having a sessile capillary deciduous pappus.

To Gnaphalium so limited Galea pinifolia, a shrub with nearly acerose leaves, and in which all or most of the flos- culi are hermaphrodite and the radii of the persistent pappus somewhat thickened upwards, cannot be referred.

It seems, however, to approach more nearly to Anten- naria, a genus separated from Gnaphalium by Gaertner, but which, as he has proposed it, consists of three tribes of

intimis involucri subsimiles, et una cum iisdem deciduae. Corollulfc glabrae antherarum integerrima. Pappus albus, radiis simplici serie.

Obs. I have not seen perfect seeds ; and as even in the unripe. fall off along with the inner squama? of the involucrum. and the anther*,. ject in a remarkable degree, it is possible the plant here described may be only the male of a dioecious species : it certainly/however, belongs to a genus not before published.

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