'The present is a shrub which belongs to the West Indies, 
and was introduced by Dr. William Houstoun before 1733. 
It seems even now to be scarce, and is not easily brought 
to flower. The specimens we have seen, have not exceeded 
three feet, and been branched nearly from bottom to top, 
The branches are flexuose, with a brown bark, furnished 
with alternate widely set leaves. Leaves rather more than 
an inch long, acutely stipulated, conjugately pinnate, 
smooth, reticulately veined, and when magnified are seen 
to be minutely fringed, common petiole shorter than the two 
partial ones, a small bracte at the junction of the last; 
each pinna or wing has four pair of leaflets, which are sessile 
with a joint, obovately oblong, rounded at the top with a 
small point, slanting at the base, inner side of the blade far 
narrower than the outer, leaflets of the lower pair very un- 
equal in size. Peduncles solitary, axillary in part of the 
upper, but not topmost, leaves of the branches, about egual 
to or rather longer than the leaf, upright, compressed, 
streaked, bearing the flowers at their top, with a pair 
of very minute bractes placed near their middle. Flowers 
without pedicles, forming by their numerous long crimson 
red filaments a nearly hemispherically radiant head at the 
end of each peduncle, Calyx herbaceous, tubular, thrice 
shorter than the corolla. Corolla of a tenderer and less 
permanent substance, deeply cleft; soon decaying, nearly 
five times shorter than the stamens. Stamens 7-10? mona- 
delphously connate for the length of the corolla, then dis: 
tinct, straight. S/y/e of the same length and colour as the 
filaments, but much thicker, often coiled at the upper part, 
In some of the flowers of the same head the pistil is gene- 
rally wanting, as in Acacia and Mimosa; which brings 
these genera within the first order of the twenty-third class 
of the Linnean system, comprehending sucb as have fertile 
and sterile flowers intermixed on the same individual. 
'The drawing was made last May, at the hothouse of the' 
botanical establishment of the Comtesse de Vandes, Bays- 
water. It requires to be kept constantly in the tan-bed of 
the.stove. 
pi a The calyx and corolla. 4 The monadelphous body of stamens. c The 
istil. 
