4 68 SCIENCE PROGRESS. 



type of the commonly cultivated and widely colonized 

 pomegranate (P. granatum). The essential difference, 

 briefly stated, is the absence in the former of the second 

 tier of carpels, which is characteristic of the ordinary 

 pomegranate, regarded by some botanists as an abnormal 

 development and a product of cultivation. The leaves are 

 larger and coarser than those of the cultivated pomegranate; 

 the flowers smaller, and the fruit much smaller. It is a 

 small tree, and is abundant on the uplands. Dendrosicyos 

 socotrana (Cucurbitacese) is singular in the order by its 

 arboreous habit, having a short, thick, fleshy trunk, some- 

 times a yard in thickness. Balfour says its soft, bare and 

 stout stems, surmounted by a tuft of few slightly pendent 

 branches, give it a fantastic look, possessed by only one or 

 two other plants in the island, namely, Adenium midti- 

 Jlorum (Apocynaceae) and Dorstenia gigas (Urticaceae) ; 

 the former of which is an exceedingly odd -looking plant, 

 with a gouty trunk a foot or two high, and sometimes as 

 much as eight feet in diameter. Dendrosicyos is paralleled in 

 Rodriguez (38) by the arboreous Mathurina ptnduliflora 

 (Turneracese), that is, in being a tree, but not in obesity, 

 for it has slender branches, and attains a height of twenty 

 feet. Its nearest ally and the only other tree in the 

 order, besides the one mentioned above from Madagascar, 

 is Erblichia, a native of Panama. Nirarathamnos (Um- 

 belliferse) is a very marked aromatic dwarf shrub, inhabiting 

 the hills at an altitude of 4000 feet. Socotora aphylla is an 

 endemic monotypic genus of the Apocynaceae, very similar 

 in habit to an Ephedra, and having coronal appendages, 

 and the floral structure generally, more like an asclepiad, but 

 wanting the pollen corpuscles. Several sections oi Euphorbia 

 are represented, and seven out of the ten species are endemic. 

 Most of them belong to the characteristic African section 

 Tirucalli, which extends across the continent to the 

 Atlantic islands, and southward to Cape Colony. E. 

 arbuscula is an arboreous species of candelabra-like habit, 

 very similar and nearly allied to the Canary Island E. 

 aphylla, rising to a height of twenty feet. E. socotrana, 

 belonging to the section Eremophyton, is an arboreous leafy 



