The first description of the female cone of this noble 

 Cycad in England was published by Dr. Masters in the 

 " Gardener's Chronicle " for 1876, with excellent figures 

 of the whole plant (male and female), its cones of both 

 sexes, and leaves, from specimens that flowered in Mr. Bull's 

 nursery. Except in its smaller size (twelve inches long 

 by five and a half inches diameter, those of the cone here 

 figured being eighteen inches long and ten inches diameter), 

 and in the crowns of the scales being smooth and 

 glabrous, and not at all tubercled, there is no appreciable 

 difference between Mr. Bull's cone and Mr. Tillett's ; and 

 as the female cones were unknown when the species was 

 first described, it is impossible to say which best accords 

 with that of the type of the species. 



An ample collection of . available materials for a 

 knowledge of Encephalarti has been collected by Mr. 

 Thiselton Dyer, and is deposited at Kew. This reper- 

 torium includes a photograph of a female cone referred 

 to E. Altensteinii, seventeen inches high and thirteen 

 inches diameter, of an exactly oblong form, that was 

 produced in the Botanic Garden of Grahamstown ; in it 

 the tips of scales are rugosely tubercled all over, and 

 the truncate area is much less distinctly defined. There 

 are also photographs of specimens with three cones from 

 Sir Thomas Shepstone's garden at Natal ; these photo- 

 graphs were numbered 43 and 73 in the Catalogue of 

 Photographs in the Natal Department of the Colonial 

 Exhibition of 1886, and are accompanied by notes from 

 Mr. G. T. Ferneyhaugh, to the effect that one of the plants 

 is supposed to be two hundred years old, and had produced 

 cones for the first time (presumably after its being planted 

 in Sir T. Shepstone's garden) ; and that the cones some- 

 times weigh thirty to forty pounds, and that the seeds of 

 Encephalarti are valued for snuff-boxes by the natives of 

 Natal. 



Another very complete description, with illustrations, of 

 E. Altensteinii is that of De Vriese in his "Description of 

 new and rare plants that flowered in the Botanic Garden of 

 Leyden." The figure which he gives of the female cone and 

 its scales precisely accords with Mr. Tillett's plant in the 

 tubercles and their woolly apices. De Vriese states that 

 the species was named after a German Maecenas of Science, 



