and Savatier as J. minuta, though it has to be observed that 
these authors describe the flowers as pale blue with purple 
veins, and identify with their species an Iris figured in the 
Honzo Zufu (vol. xxiii. fol. recto, fig. 1 recto, fig. sinistr.), 
which is altogether a different plant. On the other hand, 
the late Mr. Maximowicz has given, under J. minuta, an 
account of a coloured drawing by Siebold of a Japanese Iris 
which agrees very well with the plant now figured, and 
there is no doubt that our plant is a species to which the 
exhaustive description of /. minuta by Mr. Makino applies. 
At Kew, J. minuta has been cultivated in a pot in a cold 
frame, where it has formed grassy evergreen tufts, with 
thin, wiry, freely branching and interlacing rhizomes that 
emit numerous very thin roots. These roots, when ex- 
amined late in the season, are found to bear many very 
small potato-like tubers, in shape and size somewhat resem- 
bling the eggs of ants; these tubers may serve the purpose 
of the large fleshy tubers met with on the roots of certain 
species of Asparagus and referred to at plate 8288 of this 
work. While not a showy species, J. minuta deserves to be 
included in cultivated Iris collections; it is evidently easily 
kept in health, and promises to prove fairly hardy. It 
flowers freely in May. 
Description.— Herb, dwarf and densely tufted; root- 
stock creeping and branching, with numerous slender roots 
at length beset with many small tubers; shoots some 
flowering, others bearing only leaves. Leaves of the sterile 
shoots about 4, the lowest short and sheathing, at length 
splitting into fibrils, the others narrow ensiform, the upper- 
most barely twice as long as the flowering shoots, 18 in. 
long, 1-4 lin. wide, acute, 5—7-nerved; those of the flower- 
ing shoots all short and sheathing. Scape slender, short ; 
spathe 2-valved, 1-flowered ; valves oblanceolate, narrow, 
acute, with scarious margins, greenish, 14-134 in. long; 
pedicel slender, 2-1 in. long. Perianth yellow, 1-14 in. 
across ; tube slender, about 2 in. long; outer lobes un- 
bearded, claw erecto-patent longer than the limb, yellow 
within, greenish yellow externally, limb spreading or some- 
what deflexed, obovate, about 5 lin. long, 4 lin. wide, yellow 
and flecked with purple along the mid-rib; inner lobes 
erect, shorter than the outer, rather longer than the style- 
