Page:The Journal of Indian Botany.djvu/819

307

S.,

Presidency College, Madras. (Continued from p. 266.)

The male flowers have one petal much enlarged and projecting beyond the floral bracts, covering them : in the larger species this petal has a very conspicious black gland. Otherwise the flowers are normal : the male calyx united as a spathe split in front ; the anthers black ; the female flowers with three more or less boat-shaped sepals and three oblanceolate somewhat hairy petals. The stem is occasionally elongate, and even branched and suffruticescent. The heads are mostly semi-globular, with a convex, sometimes tall, hairy receptacle. The leaves are glabrous, and in most species characteristically thick and glossy. The involucral bracts may be dark or pale, even in the same species.

TABLE OF PROBABLE RELATIONSHIPS. (Sect, simplices)

odoratum (Malabar)

longicuspis ceylanicum

I

var. subcaulescens

I atratum cristatum

I robustum var. caulescens.

I robustum (typica).

The series seems to start with E. odoratum, or perhaps E. longi- cuspis, and to connect with the SIMPLICES through E. collinum. It is chiefly developed in Ceylon, where the several species of other authors, subcaulescens, ceylanicum, atratum and sub-glaucum, are dis- tinguishable, if the sheets in the Ceylon Herbarium are rightly so named, by characters of only minor importance, and lead by hardly more than increase in size and general robustness to E. caulescens Hook. f. ; which again differs only in being branched from E. robustum