32 Notes on Cactee. [ZOE 
indicated, 17. Spaethiana Schum, answers to one of the forms of 
var. minor Engelm. J. Spaethiana has been sent to me from 
Germany, and examination shows the rather large fruiting 
areole contiguous to the spines and the characteristic seeds of 
£. Simpsoni. 
Echinocereus Straussiana Quehl. M. f. K. x. 70 appears to be 
only £. viridiflorus var. cylindricus Engelm., Cereus viridiflorus 
tubulosus Coulter. 
PERESKIA ACULEATA Mill, commonly known as “ Blad apple”’ 
or ‘‘ Barbadoes gooseberry,’’ is a familiar and widely cultivated 
cactus, but the fruit seems nevertheless very little known, as Dr. 
Schumann, in Monog. Cact. 760, describes it as ‘‘round, spiny 
and scaly, of the size of a gooseberry, green. Seeds 3-5, com- 
pressed, oblong.”’ 
P. aculeata, in San Diego, flowers and fruits in the open air, 
requiring no protection, though the fruit is more abundant when 
the plant is screened from the sea winds. It flowers from Sep- 
tember to November, ripening its fruits in the Spring. ‘The 
ovary is leafy, with small bristly spines and some hairs in the 
axils, but the mature fruit is nearly smooth, 2-3 cm. long, 114-2 
em. thick, deep, somewhat translucent, lemon-yellow. The ter- 
minal scales of the ovary persist as fleshy infolded lobes entirely 
concealing the lower part of the withered flower, something in 
the manner of Pereskia Poeppigii (Monog. Cact., fig. 108 C.), but 
the points are so completely infolded that at first glance the berry 
seems only dimpled at the top. The berry is yellow throughout, 
the contents of the ovary proper being of a softer, more jelly-like 
consistence. The seeds (commonly only one) are nearly circular 
in outline, about 8 mm. broad, dark-brown, minutely rugose,thin, 
concavo-convex, the convex side outward, erect, with transverse 
basal hilum. Embryo forming the larger part of a ring, the lower 
part of the accumbent, foliaceous, unequal cotyledons received 
into the flange of a spool-like endosperm. 
The following description of a new species of Echinocactus is 
extracted from a paper by Dr. Weber, published in Bull. Mus. 
Hist. Nat., Paris, April, 1898. The notes concerning £. Califor- 
