NOTE ON A SUPPOSED ROOT-PARASITE FOUND AT MAHABLESHWAR. 77 



properties, nor did lie know any native name for it, though Dr. Balfour 

 describes the Balanophoracea* as being some of them styptic, and others 

 edible. I can find no reference to Balanophoracese in Dalzell and Gibson's 

 " Bombay Flora," published in 1861, nor in GelFs " Handbook for use in 

 the Jungles of Western India," published in 1863, nor in Drury's " Useful 

 Plants of India," published in 1873. In the " Cyclopsedia of Natural 

 History," published by Bradbury and Evans in 1856, two years after Dr. 

 Balfour's " Class Book," the Balanophoraceaa are described as " a natural 

 order of parasitical plants growing upon the roots of woody plants in tropical 

 countries and rooting into wood from which they draw their nutriment. 

 . . . . None of the species have fully formed leaves, but closely packed 

 fleshy scales clothe their stems and guard their flowers in their infancy. 

 Succulent in texture, dingy in colour, and often springing from a brown 

 and shapeless root stock, Balanophoracea3 remind the observer of fungi more 

 than of flowering plants, and in fact they appear intermediate in nature 

 between the two. If they have flowers and sexes both are of the simplest 

 kind, and their ovules, instead of changing to seeds like those of other 

 flowering plants, become, according to Endlicher, bags of spores, like those 

 of true flowerless plants. Even their woody system is of the most 

 imperfect kind, for it is either entirely, or almost entirely, destitute of 

 spiral vessels." This writer also notices the styptic and edible properties of 

 certain species.* Again, however, nothing is said of the large velvety ball, 

 so striking in my specimen. It is figured in the illustration to the article 

 which I have quoted, but as oval in shape, and small in size in proportion 

 to the length of the stalk, which, again, is represented as smooth and 

 slender. 



I have trespassed at this length on your patience, because, if I am 

 right in my theory that my plant was a Balanophora, it is interesting to 

 botanists for two reasons : first, as being hitherto undescribed in the 

 Flora of this Presidency ; and secondly, and specially, as being, apparently, 

 a link connecting the fungi directly with the flowering plants, without the 

 intervention of the Ferns and other higher orders of Cryptogams, which 

 may possibly be of value in the discussion of the Darwinian theory of 

 evolution. 



J. B. H. 



* Dr. Dymock, in his " Materia Medica of Western India," states that a drug is sold in 

 Bombay called by the natives Gaj Pipal, which Messrs. S Arjun and N. M. Khan Sahib con- 

 sider to be the entire plant of a Balanophora. It appears to be of a different species to the 

 above, and is considered mucilaginous and astringent.— J. B. H. 



