206 Trans. Acad. Sci. of St. Louis. 



is absent. A detailed description of the seedlings is unneces- 

 sary, since the figures are self-explanatory. The plumule 

 develops very rapidly when it once begins and after the first 

 lanceolate leaf the leaves are usually five foliolate and very 

 similar in form to those of the mature individuals. The coty- 

 ledons are persistent for about three months, a surprising 

 point of observation on the material available for this study 

 being that in some cases the smaller cotyledon remained on the 

 plant the longer. The dilatation of the base of the main axis, 

 so prominent in the older individuals, soon exhibits itself in the 

 seedlings, the hypocotyl at the end of five months being quite 

 strongly developed, the expansion, however, being quite uni- 

 form throughout the greater part of the length to near the 

 prominent, brown, cotyledonary scars, where the brownish, 

 striated hypocotyl is rapidly attenuated into the smooth, 

 green, epicotyledonary internodes. 



So far as I am able to ascertain, the germination of Pachira 

 has been mentioned in the literature four times. Doumet* 

 describes and figures fruit, seed and abnormal seedlings of a 

 Pachira of the specific name of which he was uncertain. 

 Lynch t describes and figures the seed and seedlings of P. aquat- 

 ica and figures an abnormal seedling of Pachira sp. Harz, % 

 in the second volume of his Landwirthschaftlidie 8amen- 

 hunde (1885) mentions P. aquatica as one of many forms of 

 Dicotyledonous plants with one or both cotyledons rudimen- 

 tary. Lubbock II states with a reference to Lj^nch's paper, 

 that in P. aquatica the cotyledons are subterranean, but this 

 is evidently an oversight on his part, since neither the text 

 nor the plate of Lynch's paper justifies such a statement. 



In working over the material for this paper, my attention 

 was called to a point in the nomenclature of the forms which 

 is deserving of attention. Carolinea campestris was briefly 

 described by Martins (Nov. Gen. et Sp. PI. 1 : 86) and from 

 this very short description the other descriptions (Don. 



* Doumet. loc. cit. 



t Lynch, loc. cit. 



X Accoidicg to the review in Just's Jahresbericht. 



II Lubbock, Sir Joliu. A Contributiou to our Knowledge of Seedlings. 



1:246. 1892. 



