OF THE GENUS ILLIGERA. 291 
similarity in habit, foliage and inflorescence, however, led Miquel (Fl. Ind. 
Bat. i. 1. 1094) to reduce Henschelia tentatively to /lligera ; and this reduction 
is now confirmed by Mr. Elmer D. Merrill, who has compared side by side 
the types of Henschelia luzonensis, Presl, and Jlligera Meyeniana, Kunth, 
which he finds to be conspecific. 
Gronovia and Coryzadenia were proposed by their authors for species 
whose affinities to Jlligera they did not recognize, probably on account of the 
inaccuracy of Blume's original diagnosis. 
At the time that Blume wrote, mature fruits of the two species before him 
were not known, and it was from an examination of immature material, 
and under the influence of the recognized affinities of his genus with the 
Lauracez, that he was unfortunately led to the erroneous conclusion that 
the fruit of the genus was a wingless drupe and that the cotyledons of the 
embryo were convolute. These conjectural characters Blume indiscreetly 
included in the essential diagnosis of his genus, and when nearly forty years 
later Meissner had five species, agreeing closely in floral characters, under 
consideration for his revision of /lligera in DeCandolle’s * Prodromus’ (xv. 
i. 251), he very doubtfully included the only one of which ripe fruit was 
known (J. dubia, Span.), because it had a dry winged fruit and not a wingless 
drupe. In the following year (1865) Hooker fil. revised the genus for the 
‘Genera Plantarum.’ He had access to specimens of several Indian species 
with almost identical flowers but, like the above, with winged fruit. With 
characteristic clearness of judgment Hooker saw for the first time that 
Blume's diagnosis was wrong, no examples of mature wingless fruit had 
been found, and he amended this generic character accordingly. ОЁ the 
13 species now known 10 have winged fruit, while in the remainder ripe 
fruit is still undeseribed. It is therefore in the highest degree probable that 
the fruit of /lligera is invariably winged. 
The character of the staminal whorl and its accessory organs is so peculiar 
that it is desirable to describe it in detail. The stamens are opposite to the 
outer segments of the perianth and dehisce by two lateral valves which open 
from the inner side and remain fixed, at uny rate for a time, by their outer 
or by their upper edges. Between them and the inner whorl of the perianth 
are two sets of organs. The outer consists of five glands opposite to the 
inner perianth segments; this might be looked upon as the disc, for in 
the young bud this whorl is an obscurely toothed ring on the inner side of 
which the stamens arise. The teeth alternate with the stamens and develop 
into the glands. When fully formed they are sessile or shortly stalked 
globular bodies or shallow fleshy, often lobed cups. [Ог, on the other hand, 
the glands of the outer whorl might be regarded as staminodes, homologous 
with an outer whorl of stamens in Lauraceæ.] The inner whorl comprises 
ten nectaries associated in pairs with the stamens, and cither actually attached 
y2 
