60 



Botanical Periodicals, 



One of Mr. Douglas's new plants is Oenothera 

 pallida, a handsome creeping-rooted hardy- 

 perennial, well calculated for coming into 

 universal culture. A good idea of the plant may 

 be formed from a figure of QS^nothera speciosa. 

 {Jig. 29.) 



Loddiges's Botanical Cabinet, contains ten 

 figures, one or two of which are new plants, and 

 some of the others curious old ones. Stapelia 

 stellaris (Jig. 30.)[ is 

 rather a scarce spe- 

 cies of a family very 

 numerous in the de- 

 serts between the 

 ridges of mountains 

 above the Cape of 



Good Hope, and which, with other suc- 

 culent plants, are, by their fleshy struc- 

 ture and having scarcely any pores in their 

 cuticle, enabled to retain water sufficient to 

 enable them to survive the long periods of 

 drought which prevail in those regions. The 

 plants of this genus are, to the eye of a com- 

 mon observer, without leaves, these being sub- 

 stituted by scale-like protuberances on the 

 branches. The flowers may be considered as 

 large in proportion to the size of the plant, the latter being seldom 

 above a foot high. They have a singular character of richness in colour 

 and succulency of texture, and smell strongly of sulphurated hydrogen or 

 carrion. Only two species of this genus were known to Linnaeus in 1762. 

 In our Hortus Britannicus 200 species are enumerated as cultivated in Bri- 

 tain, or having been intro- \^^ ff ^ 31 ^ 

 duced into it. — JE'uph6rbia '''^ 

 caput Medus(2f. {Jig.3\. a). 

 This plant also is a native of 

 Africa, and belongs to a fa- 

 mily of which there are up- 

 wards of 100 species. It is 

 called Medusa's head from 

 the circumstance of the prin- 

 cipal shoots or branches pro- 

 ducing from their extremities 

 numerous small branches all 

 round a sort of head which 

 is formed there. These small 

 branches (6), in conformity 

 with the general tendency 

 of the mind to compare ideas, and the taste of the early part of the 

 eighteenth century, when the plant was discovered, for allusions to 

 classical antiquity, were supposed to bear a resemblance to the snakes, 

 instead of locks of hair, with which the head of the Gorgon Medusa 

 was invested by the Greek mythology. All the species of ^uphorbea 

 abound in a milky fluid, which is exceedingly acrid, and will raise blisters 

 on the skin. That of an annual British species, E. /iclioscopia, or 

 Sun Spurge, is used by country people to destroy warts ; that of E. caput 

 Medusa?, now before us, is said, when thickened, to make a very good 

 birdlunc. 



