Hochstetter in 1840 as the type of his genus Valoradia. 
Hochstetter’s plant had, however, been collected by 
Salt a generation earlier, and had been treated in 1814 
by R. Brown as a Plumbago, P. eglandulosa. The first 
observer to recognize the identity of Ceratostigma and 
Valoradia was Boissier, who, for reasons no longer con- 
sidered adequate, in 1848 employed Hochstetter’s name 
in preference to the older one used by Bunge. The 
discovery, since Boissier wrote, of a number of other 
species of Ceratostigma in Central and South-western 
China, in Indo-China, in Tibet and in Bhutan, has 
reduced considerably the extent of the gap between the 
localities occupied by the genus on which stress has so 
often been laid. The eight species now known include 
two, from Abyssinia and Somaliland, that are best dis- 
tinguished from their six Asiatic congeners by their sessile 
stigmatic glands. The six Asiatic species include two 
that are best distinguished from the other four because 
their leaf-buds and shoot-bases are not perulate. The 
familiar C. plumbaginoides, already alluded to, is one 
of the species with naked buds; it forms as a cultivated 
plant large tufts, rarely more than a foot in height, with 
striking dark-green leaves that take on a handsome 
brownish-red autumnal tint, and make an admirable 
and effective contrast with the gentian-blue flowers. 
Except for its larger size and looser habit the species 
now figured, C. Willmottianum, Stapf, as grown at Kew, 
resembles C. plumbaginoides so closely that it might 
pardonably be taken for a form of that species with 
rather smaller leaves of a paler green which do not display 
the autumnal bronzing. Closer attention to the plant 
now figured, for the material of which we are indebted 
to Miss E. A. Willmott, in whose garden at Warley Place 
two plants were raised from seed received by her from 
the Arnold Arboretum, and obtained by Mr. E. H. Wilson 
during his last journey in Western China, shows, how- 
ever, other marked differences. The flowers are of a 
rather paler blue than in C. plumbaginoides ; the anthers 
are hardly exserted; the leaves are hispidly hairy on 
both surfaces, as well as hispidly ciliate on the margin, 
whereas in C. plumbaginoides only the margin is hispid ; 
finally, the buds are protected by coriaceous scales, so 
