sent from Honduras soon covered the back wall of a rather lofty 
greenhouse, with its repent and climbing and straggling branches. 
These vary somewhat in size in different parts of the plant, but 
are generally not thicker than the little-finger, dark green, terete, 
or with here and there very obtuse and not continuous angles. 
The surface is irregularly tuberculated, and in the areole of the 
tubercle is a short solitary (or sometimes two) inconspicuous 
black or dark brown spine. The duds and flowers are so large 
and so showy, that they would seem as if they could not belong 
to such meagre, half-starved, leafless branches. The dud mea- 
sures fourteen inches long! Its base is swollen, bulbiform, clothed 
with densely imbricated hairy scales of a triangular form. ‘The 
tube is long, cylindrical, dark glaucous-green, tinged with brown, 
striated, partially scaly, with small appressed scales fringed with 
brown hairs: the compacted imbricated calyx-sepals (including 
the petals) form an ovate acuminate-oblong head to the bud, 
orange, streaked with red. At night the flower expands, and 
fades before the evening, to a diameter of fourteen inches ! yet 
the bursting extends no further down the flower than to the top 
of the long calycine tube. The calye consists of numerous sepals, 
spreading and soon becoming flaccid and reflexed ; they are linear, 
acute, the outer red, the inner orange; they form a distinct por- 
tion from the petals, a saucer-like exterior, if we may so say, not 
passing into the petals, quite differing in shape and colour. These 
latter form a crown within the highly coloured calyx, but not 
so regularly a cup-shaped one as in C. grandiforus ; the petals, 
‘lanceolate or spathulate in form, are not so compact as in that 
species, and their apices are more spreading. Stamens longer 
than the tube, forming a circle around the style; but the sta- 
mens are In Numerous series below the style ; only in one series 
above the style. Style thick, columnar, longer than the stamens. 
Stigma of many long, papillose, yellow rays, 
Our original drawing of Cereus MacDon, 
space is fully occupied b i 
front view of a flower, and a fully formed bud. Had we confined our figure to a 
single flower in quarto, natural size, it could have been seen only from one point 
of view: but we regret to find that by reducing the scale one-half, it quite takes 
away from all idea of the magnificence of the original ; and the assurance that 
the plant is éwice that size does not convey the correct idea to the mind’s eye. 
