144 THE BOTANY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA. 
closely covered with minute hairs; the corolla is small and green, with 
erimson filaments. 
I met with two or three species of a genus with clammy leaves, op- 
posite or in whorls, bearing blue flowers, and having seed-vessels 
shaped like Antirrhinum, and with very small seed; also a little creep- 
ing plant like Clintonia pulchella, which grows abundantly by the sides 
of the pools near the mines on the Murchison; I suppose it belongs to 
Scrophulariee, but my specimens of them are not yet come to hand, and 
I cannot describe them correctly. I met with several new Solana on 
the Murchison. One is a shrub about two feet high, with slender nu- 
merous aculeated branches, and small oval leaves about an inch long; it 
bears small blue flowers and berries about the size of swan-shot ; they 
are white when ripe, sometimes with alternate stripes of green. Ano- 
ther stemless species of Solanum, with large white downy thorny leaves, . - 
is common on the Marchison, but the flowers were past, only their 
calyx remaining, and I could find no seed-vessels. But the most in- - 
teresting plant I met with belonging to this Order, has small black 
flowers, velvety inside: the leaves are about an inch aud a half long 
and about half an inch wide; the stems and leaves are without spines: ` 
the plant is very rare on the great sand-plain between the Hutt and the 
Murchison. ; 
A fine plant belonging to Asperifolia, and apparently forming a new 
genus*, appears in great abundance and perfection on the sand-banks in 
the sheltered bed of the Irwin river; it grows to be six or eight feet 
high, with numerous branches, which terminate in panicles of large, light 
blue, Borage-like flowers; the anthers and style, stigma, etc., of this 
plant are at,the time of flowering covered by a curious calyptra, formed 
by five scales, which rise from the back of the anthers in the lower part 
of the tube next the corolla; these scales are firmly united by interlaced 
cilia, but in the upper half they are free, and grow in a spiral manner 
coming to a sharp point; the style comes in contact with the pollen of 
the anthers iu passing up through this covering, but it ultimately rises 
above the calyptra, forcing open, as it passes, the spiral part, which, as 
soon as it is passed, closes on the style and capitate stigma. The plant 
is perennial, with a sort of woody stem, five or six inches in diameter 
near the ground; it rises readily from seed, and would be a great or- 
nament to the gardens and shrubberies of Perth. A splendid Lesche- 
` * No doubt Trichodesma, Br.—Ep. ; 
