darkest-coloured and most glossy, is obsoletely tuberculated with 
small, raised, distant points, nearly plane, but sometimes slightly 
channelled or grooved in the centre, destitute of stria, but in 
the young leaves the surface, under a rather strong lens, has a 
minutely furfuraceous appearance ; beneath the margin is slightly 
recurved, and there is a carina or slightly projective keel or 
midrib, and the surface is seen to be minutely and closely stri- 
ated; the margin is quite entire, solitary, no single tooth in the 
plant now before us; but we possess other plants, and of various 
ages, in which some of the leaves are as entire as in this, while 
others have a greater or less number of leaflets with one or two 
or three remote teeth, generally on one (the lower) side or margin, 
and these are often large and spinulose, and as if effected by a 
gash, mostly near the base, approaching in character some of the 
lesser divisions in the leaflets of #. horridus, in no case confined 
to the apex of a branch, as the toothing is said to be in both the 
varieties of #. Caffer mentioned by Aiton.* 
Matz Amentum one foot nine inches long, including the 
short, stout stipes, sixteen inches in girth, arising from the apex 
of the trunk and from the centre of the crown of leaves, con- 
sisting of-a number of scales attached to a central axis, united 
into the form of a nearly cylindrical, moderately acute cone, four 
inches in diameter. Each scale (anther, according to the views 
of those who compare, and with much reason, the floral organs 
of the Cycadee with those of Conifere,—and, what are here 
called anther-cells, po//en-masses),—is about two inches long in 
the widest part of the amentum, broad, oblong-cuneate, thick, 
leathery, almost woody when old, tawny-brown, thicker in the 
middle and keeled on the under side, rough and tuberculated 
as if by a wrinkling of the substance, terminating in a kind of 
rostrum, more or less long and more or less truncated at its 
apex, which is curved downwards. The under side of this is 
covered with crowded, tawny-orange, one-celled, globose, firm 
and subcoriaceous, quite sessile azther-cells, splitting open on 
the anterior side longitudinally into two valves, and filled with 
a pale globose subpellucid powder, which, under a microscope, is 
seen to be marked with a transverse line. These anther-cells and 
their contents bear a most exact resemblance to the spores and 
spore-cases of Botrychium among Ferns. 
Fig. 1. Lower portion of a leaf. 2, 3. Upper and under side of a male scale 
of the male amentum or cone :—wat. size. 4, 5. Anther-cases. 6. Spores :— 
magnified. 
* Since this description was printed, I have received from James Yates, Esq., 
Lauderdale House, Highgate, a letter full of interesting information on this and 
other allied species of Encephalartus, too long for insertion, but which I trust 
will be allowed to appear in another place. He had however long ago considered 
our present plant to be H. Caffer, and L. longifolius a mere state of the same. 
