upwards, and smaller, covered underneath with narrow close- 

 set silvery white lines formed of minute scurfy scales, im- 

 biicately fascicled below aad faintly purple at the inner 

 side, outer ones generally more or less revolute, inner ones 

 straighter, gradually higl^er, but all are overtopped by the 

 flower-spike. Scape simple, cylindrical, scarcely thicker 

 than the tube of a ewan-quiU, central, even with the 

 leaves, white and woolly, upright, forming a club with the 

 inflorescence, beset on all sides quite up to the spike by 

 thin light brown membranous darker-nerved spathe-like 

 longly lanceolate finely tapered loosely imbricated wideset 

 flowefless bractes. Spike strobiliform, oblong, obtuse (two 

 inches long or more?), twice the diameter of a man's 

 thumb, disposed in six ? widish-set rows, woolly : flowers 

 bracteless? sessile, projecting, about half an inch long, 

 tubular, loosely arranged in whorls of threes, alternate in 

 relation to a six-ranked order, immerged at the base in the 

 wool of the scape. Germen short, with nearly the same 

 eircnmference as the cjdyx, scariose, green, transparent, 

 cylindrical, with three short veitical wings formed by its 

 compressed taper-edged angles, marked with darker veins 

 retlculately confineut at the base, many-seeded, white- 

 woolled at the upper part ; ovules in several-fold order, im- 

 bricated upwards, ovately oblong, fixed to the inner corners 

 of the cell by a somewhat clubbed diaphanous thick succu- 

 lent strophiola or umbilical pedicle. Cah/x continuous 

 with the germen, pale green, roundly three-cornered j le£^- 

 lets three, thick, hard, fleshy, converging into a short 

 tube and deeply imbricated at their sides, downy white on 

 the outside. Petals 3, of a black purple colour, stiff, 

 straight, erectly convergent, about a third longer than the 

 calyx, with a linearly oblong involutely hollowed lamina 

 tranc^tely retuse and eroded at the top, and a broad short 

 ungids of the same colour and crowned across the top on 

 the inside by a curled fringe of the same colour. Stamens 

 enclosed, upright, three aJtemate ones shorter, with flla- 

 ments much shorter than the anther, and inserted at the top 

 of the unguis, the three others with slenderer longer filor- 

 ments inserted at the thickened summit of the germen : 

 anthers linearly long, pale, turned inwards, upright, move- 

 able, suspended by their back to the fine pmnted to^ of the 

 filament. Style upright, enclosed, of the colour of the 

 filaments : stigmata three, widened into a lobular form, 

 short, sooner or later united by twisting. 



