394 The Rev. R. T. Lowe on Chamameles coriacea 



C. coriacea is one of the rarest plants in Madeira ; and at pre- 

 sent I am only acquainted with one locality for it. This is on 

 the sea-cliffs to the eastward of Funchal, about a mile out of the 

 town along the Canifo road. As this is a direction very likely 

 to be taken in a short botanical ramble by a casual visitor, it 

 might well be supposed by such a person that the plant was far 

 more common than a longer residence would discover to be the 

 case. It grows at the summit on the extreme verge of the cliff 

 (in this place about two hundred or three hundred feet high), or 

 on its perpendicular face a little lower down, forming a thick 

 evergreen bush about four or five feet high, with something of 

 the habit of the pomegranate {Punica Granatum). The soil (if 

 soil it can be called) an arid crumbling tufa, mixed with basaltic 

 debris. The flowers are produced abundantly in the months of 

 December, January, or February, according to the earliness of 

 the autumnal rains. Very few of them come to perfection, and 

 the fruit is not ripe before the following November or De- 

 cember. It is indeed so rarely perfected, that from the whole 

 of the bushes, five or six in number, which had been covered 

 the same month of the preceding year with a profusion of 

 flowers, 1 only obtained, last December, eleven in a full-grown 

 ripe state. 



When thus mature, the fruit or haw is quite smooth and even, 

 of a globose-oblong subpyriform shape, flattened or truncate at 

 the apex, and depressed or with a small hollow in the centre, 

 which is nearly covered and concealed by the converging, 

 withered and blackened, or discoloured segments of the calyx. 

 It is about the size of the fruit of CratcBgus oxyacanthOi which 

 indeed it exactly resembles externally in every thing but colour ; 

 this being in the present plant, when fully ripe, pale yellowish- 

 white, or rather a rich cream-colour. Length, at most half an 

 inch ; breadth, three-eighths. Flesh (sarcocarpium) thick, i. e. a 



little 



