Botanical Notices from Spain. 417 



he has stated on the structure of the fibres ; but I am not of his 

 opinion with regard to the first degi'ee of the development of the 

 leaf, seeing that at the beginning it does not appear to me to 

 have the form of a hood, but rather that of a small crest [crista 

 or plica) with a vertical direction. 



My observations have been especially made on the ChamcEdorea 

 elatiory the subterraneous caudices of which are ramified, and pre- 

 sent in their buds all the conditions necessary for the examination 

 of the origin both of the elementary organs and of the leaves, 

 branches and regimes. These observations have also convinced 

 me that the bicarinated leaf, which often commences the forma- 

 tion of the leaves in the branches of the Monocotyledons, and 

 which is repeated in the morphology of the spathelles of the Gra- 

 minece, is not formed by the coalescence of two leaves. It is only 

 a solitary leaf, furnished with an extremely thin lamina, and which 

 soon disappears. You are aware that the nature of these leaves 

 has long been a subject of discussion by MM. Turpin and Robert 

 Brown, and recently by M. Roper, whose results agree with mine. 



LXII. — Botanical Notices from Spain. By Moritz Willkomm*. 



[Continued from p. 185.] 

 No. III. Aranjuez, 8th of July 1844. 



On the 18th of June I left Valencia, which had detained me within 

 its walls longer than I wished. Immediately on leaving the charming 

 Huerta, you enter a wood of olive and St. John's bread trees (Cerato- 

 nia Siliqua) with Kentrophyllum lanatum, DeC, growing in great plenty 

 beneath them, which accompanied us from here almost to Madrid. 

 So long as we were in the kingdom of ^'alencia, the country was 

 very fertile, well-cultivated, and clothed with timber ; the broad val- 

 ley of Incar filled with rice- fields, the view of the romantic Sierra de 

 CuUera, and the environs of the friendly town St. Felipe, were in 

 particular among the fairest regions I had hitherto seen in Spain. As 

 soon, however, as you have traversed the Pass of Almansa, you come 

 into a desert, treeless, thinly-peopled, elevated plain in the province 

 of Albacete, belonging to the kingdom of Murcia; low, uniform 

 hills of chalk alternating with wheat-fields and waste sterile plains 

 clothed with solitary specimens of an umbelHferous plant which ap- 

 peared to me to be Elceoselinum fostidum, Boiss., and with Retama 

 sphcerocarpa, Boiss. Still more desert and equally devoid of trees is 

 the country beyond Albacete, at the entrance into the poor province 

 of La Mancha, the villages of which lie so scattered that they resem- 

 ble heaps of stones and ruins more than human abodes. All this ren- 



* Translated from the Botanische Zeitung, Nov. 8, 1844, and communi- 

 cated by A. Henfrey, F.L.S. 



