having the flowers appearing in terminal tufts, white, and 
the filaments glabrous. I do not find the silvery pales 
of the pedicels and ovary to be described by any author, 
those of the former are one-sixteenth of an inch long, 
twice as long as those of the pedicels ; they are modifications 
of the silvery hairs of R. indicum. — 
Plants of R. serpyllifolium were purchased for the Royal 
Gardens from the Yokohama Nursery Company in 1895,: 
and are now about a foot high; they flower in April, and 
though possibly hardy, succeed best when grown in pots, 
and kept in a close frame. 
Deser—A very stout, scrubby, much _ irregularly 
branched, rigid shrub, of low stature; bark dark brown ; 
branchlets strigose with rigid appressed subulate bristles. 
Leaves deciduous, crowded, sessile, and as if whorled on 
very short lateral branchlets, rarely more than a third of 
an inch long, obovate, ciliate on the margins and surfaces, 
neither glandular nor lepidote, bright green above, pale 
beneath. Flowers solitary, subsessile, from special (leafless) 
buds at the ends of the leafy branchlets, surrounded by 
brown, ovate-oblong, obtuse, yellow, scarious bracts; pedicels 
very short, clothed with silvery, scurfy lanceolate scales. 
Calyx a small patelliform disk, with five broadly rounded 
ciliate lobes. Corolla about an inch broad, bright rose- 
red; tube very short, funnel-shaped, quite glabrous without 
and within; lobes five, oblong-ovate, obtuse, spreading. 
Stamens 5, filaments longer than the corolla-lobes, slender, 
glandular below the middle; anthers small, shortly oblong, 
brown. Ovary oblong, five-celled, clothed like the pedicels 
with linear silvery hyaline scales ; style slender, glabrous ; 
stigma small, capitellate.—J. D. H. 
Fig. 1, Portion of branchlet; 2, leaves bracts and ovary; 3, pedicel and 
ovary ; 4, hyaline scales of ovary ; 5, stamen :—A/l enlarged. 
