ON TWO NEW SPECIES OF LAURINEA. 625 
commanded a higher price than any other wood in the 
market; but the botanical character of the tree, which fur- 
nished such useful timber, remained unknown. 
A new interest was attached to this tree when in 1834 
Mr. Rodie, late a Surgeon in the Royal Navy, discovered 
that the fruit and bark of the Greenheart contained a vege- 
table alkali which he used with the greatest success in the 
intermittent fevers of that colony. His attempts at that time 
to draw the attention of the medical profession to this dis- 
covery, failed. I observe, however, that on the 17th of April, 
1843, a paper “on the Bebeeru tree of British Guiana, by 
Douglas Maclagan, M.D., F.R.S.E.," was read at the Royal 
Society of Edinburgh,* which gives the results of Dr. Mac- 
lagan’s experiments, while at the same time he regrets being 
unacquainted with its botanical character. 
It was natural that at my first arrival in Guiana my curi- 
OSIty was attracted to this remarkable tree ; but all attempts 
to procure specimens of its flowers proved in vain, with the 
exception of a poor specimen which Mr. Patterson, an ex- 
tensive woodcutter, presented to me. "The flowers were de- 
cayed, and though I thought I could not be mistaken in 
Pronouncing it a Laurinaceous plant, it proved impossible to 
assign the section of this extensive family to which it be- 
longed. 
lt appears other Botanists have been equally unsuccessful, 
and I presume it must be ascribed to the anxious wish to 
have the uncertainty cleared up, that Dr. Graham contented 
himself with imperfect flowers of this tree, to establish a new 
genus. They were all abnormal, the parts of the flower 
being irregularly increased in number, a circumstance ob- 
Served in several species of Laurinec. 
Shortly before I left Guiana I was able to procure some 
More perfect inflorescence, which I sent to Mr. Bentham, and 
with his assistance, I can now give the following description, 
which will prove it to be a somewhat anomalous species of 
Nectandra, 
* Since printed in the Transactions of that Society, Vol. xv. part 111. 
