178 NOTE ON ARACHIS HYPOGHA. 
Society, on the structure and affinities of Arachis, in which 1 pointed 
out the curiously imperfect achlamydeous female flowers from which the 
fruits are produced, whilst the apparently perfect hermaphrodite flowers 
are, generally speaking, if not always, barren, and I showed a elosely 
similar structure and fructification in Stylosanthes, next to which I pro- 
posed to place Arachis among Hedysaree. This paper was published 
in the eighteenth volume of the * Linnean Transactions,’ a work which 
is unfortunately far too expensive and bulky to have any circulation 
among foreign botanists. The conclusions I had come to became known 
to them only by abstracts contained in botanical journals or other com- 
pilations, unaccompanied by the observations from whence they had 
been deduced ; and my proposal for associating Arachis with Hedysaree 
has been more than once treated as absurd, without however auy facts 
or arguments being brought forward in opposition. Recently again à 
- writer in ‘Silliman’s American Journal,’ Mr. Hugh M. Neisler, whose 
article is reproduced in the last number of * Taylor's Annals of Natural 
History,' adduces some observations of his own in support of a denial 
of the existence of the two kinds of flowers in Arachis, although he 
also had not seen my paper, the details of which Would probably have 
led him to perceive his mistake. At the time I wrote it I had only 
had dried specimens to examine, but these were numerous and good, 
belonging to several species of rachis, and to about twenty species oT 
marked varieties of Stylosanthes. I have since then repeatedly exa- 
mined dried specimens of both these genera, as well as of Chapmannia, 
and have observed Arachis hypogea in a living state, especially in the 
. summer of 1853, when I had the opportunity, in the Botanic Garden 
at Leipzig, of rooting up and carefully examining several plants of that 
z species, bearing a profusion of flowers of both kinds, in various stages 
of development. These flowers always appear several together, in short, 
close spikes, in the axillæ of the leaves. In the upper axillæ, the 
barren but apparently perfect flowers are the most numerous; but even 
these are generally accompanied by one or more of the minute fertile 
ones, and the latter, which are always without calyx or corolla, become 
more numerous in the lower axillee. The withered perfect flowers re- 
- main long sticking about the spike, and may sometimes be found appa- 
: rently adhering to (but not connected with) the point of the fertilized 
ovary of the female flower, and borne along with it as its stipes length- 
ens, as mentioned by Mr. Neisler; but I always find within the tube 
