INDIAN SPECIES OF UTBICTJLABIA. 171 



suites of specimens which have been placed in my hands illustra- 

 tive of each or of most of the species. I have thus been enabled 

 to dissect and compare numerous examples, and have been spared 

 the contracted views of their specific limitation, which, with less 

 ample material, I should surely have adopted. The chief diffi- 

 culties in their study I have found to arise from the extreme 

 brevity and insufficiency of the older descriptions, and the multi- 

 plication of ' book species,' founded upon the unwarrantable data 

 afforded by solitary or very imperfect specimens. The examina- 

 tion of the parts of the flower in the Utricularias, also, is a labour 

 absorbing much time, from the care required in their dissection, 

 resulting less from any structural complication than from the 

 marked tenuity of the corolla, — while the frequent variability, even 

 in the same species, in the form of parts upon which important 

 characters are often based, demands an attentive comparison of 

 examples. The settlement of the synonymy of several species, and 

 the reduction of those specific names which have been applied 

 either to individual varieties or to mere forms, has been, I hope, 

 not an unuseful result of their study. 



The more important recent contributions to our knowledge of 

 these plants are the papers of Benjamin, in the ' Botanische Zeit- 

 ung ' and the * Linnsea ; ' of Edgeworth in the ' Proceedings of the 

 Linnean Society ;' of Dalzell in the ' Kew Journal of Botany ;' and 

 the figures and descriptions in the ' Icones Plantarum Indise Ori- 

 entalis ' of Dr. Wight. "With regard to the descriptions of the 

 first-named author (although generally drawn up with care, yet 

 founded too often upon very imperfect and incomplete examples), 

 I should have felt them particularly embarrassing, were it not that, 

 in the herbarium of Sir W. J. Hooker, I have had access to speci- 

 mens of many of them authenticated by his own labels. The 

 contribution of M. P. Edgeworth, contained in the first volume of 

 our old ' Proceedings,' I should have most certainly overlooked, 

 had not J. J. Bennett kindly called my attention to it. Its most 

 important feature is the description of a supposed new genus of 

 Lentibularice, under the name of Diurospermum, from the Western 

 Himalaya. It would appear that no specimens of this plant have 

 been sent over by the author of this paper ; at least, in the herbaria 

 to which I have referred, none are to be found ; but I feel tolerably 

 confident that his plant may be recognized in a small and very 

 interesting species collected in Kumaon by Strachey and Win- 

 terbottom. I account for one or two little discrepancies by the 

 assumption that Edgeworth' s specimens have been either few or 



