SOUTH AMERICAN PLANTS. 129 
greatly resembles that of Petunia, and is much like the develop- 
ment of the stigma, which I have sometimes seen in the Chile 
variety of Wahtenbergia linarioides. Tt has an entire, small, 
annular, fleshy, epigynous ring, surrounding the base of the style, 
as in the Lobeliacee. Its seeds are neither lenticulate, nor 
winged, but oval and striated, with a somewhat scrobiculate and 
reticulated testa. Its general habit is very peculiar, being some- 
what herbaceous, of an arid appearance when dried, with small radical 
rigid leaves, having sharp spinose teeth, while its cauline leaves 
are ternate, involucrating, and surrounding the base of a solitary 
sessile flower in each alternate axil, the two lateral ones being 
actually inserted upon the ovarium; these resemble in form the 
persistent segments of the calyx, being linear and rigid, with a few 
somewhat retrorse teeth on the margin, which are hard and 
spinescent, and sometimes double. In the ascendant position of 
its ovules, and in the form and direction of the embryo, it resem- 
bles all the other orders of the Campanal alliance. 
It must be evident from the above facts, that the affinity of 
Cyphocarpus is unquestionably. with the class of the Campanulinee, 
but it cannot obtain a tenable place in any of the five orders com- 
posing that class,* for which reason I would rather suggest the 
propriety of giving it a distinct station, and making it the type of 
an aberrant group, of which, probably, many others remain to be 
discovered, or may now, perhaps, be found in existing herbaria. 
It certainly borders closely upon Campanulacea, through Prisma- 
tocarpus ; upon Lobeliacea,t through Grammatotheca, Clintonia, 
* Tfin any place, it would certainly stand as a third tribe of the Campanulacee, 
but in an instance like the above, where a plant osculates closely upon several different 
orders and cannot be arranged in any one of them, without breaking down the few 
limits of demarcation between very natural families, it appears to me less objectionable 
to classify it under a distinct title, as a separate group, than to force it into an un- 
natural position. This genus may therefore remain for the present, as the nucleus of 
a suborder, attached to the class Campanulinee, after the example of the Spheno- 
cleacee, until other analogous plants be detected, that may claim for the Cypho- 
carpacee its due place, as a recognized family in the Natural System. 
+ I have noticed in many of the Cape species of Lodedza a very distinctly gibbous 
palate, similar to that described in Cyphocarpus ; but strange to say, I can find 
nowhere, either in the descriptions, or in the figures of any botanical work, any 
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