" The genus Eleutherine was founded in MS. notes for an 

 arrangement of the confused mass of plants heaped together 

 under the name Sisyrinchium, which cannot be well com- 

 pleted, from the difficulty of investigating the minute structure 

 of such fugacious flowers in dry specimens, and the equal 

 difficulty of obtaining and cultivating several of them. The 

 type of the genus Eleutherine is the plant figured in the Bot. 

 Mag. under the name Marica plicata, and named in Sweet's 

 Hort. Brit. Sisyrinchium latifolium. It has very little affinity 

 indeed to Marica, of which the character and species were, 

 not long ago, detailed in the Bot. Mag., and it is very different 

 from Sisyrinchium. Its affinities are to Gelasine, Nemostylis, 

 and Cipura, and it may be, that Nemostylis and Eleutherine 

 will be found to range under Gelasine as sections. The pre- 

 vailing colour of Gelasine and Nemostylis is blue or purple, 

 of Eleuther.'ne white. Prof. Endlicher, whose view of the 

 genera of plants is valuable, because he has dealt with the 

 greater part of his subject with more knowledge and discri- 

 mination than he has applied to Iridacese and Amaryllidacese, 

 has thrown the genus Gelasine into Trichonema, and he would 

 probably refer this plant to the same genus. He might 

 as well refer it to Crocus, with which Trichonema is much 

 more closely allied than with these plants. Trichonema in 

 all its various species may be at once recognized in the dry 

 bulb or the fruit, and may be called the lowland Crocus, ex- 

 tending N. and S. from Guernsey and Jersey (of which the 

 native species has been set down for a Crocus by R. & Sch.) 

 to the Cape, E. and W. from Socotra to the Spanish peninsula. 

 When he shall have marched a few more Sisyrinchioid de- 

 tachments into the same depot, he will find very little sub- 

 ordination in the corps. In arranging the hexandrous plants 

 it was the duty of a person undertaking such a work to have 

 examined the volume " Amaryllidacese," which he must have 

 known from the works he quotes to have been some time pub- 

 lished, and he would there have found the affinities of the 

 various groups set forth upon a basis at least of tolerable cor- 

 rectness, and would not have presented such an imbroglio of 

 that order to the public. It is open to a person, who is fond 

 of generalizing, to set forth the Cyrtanthiform, Hippeastri- 

 form, and Amarylliform divisions of the order as genera, 

 Cyrtanthus, Hippeastrum, and Amaryllis, and to place Val- 

 lota, &c. Sprekelia, &c. Crinum, &c. as sections of them re- 

 spectively, but ignorance of the subject alone could induce a 

 person to preserve the subordinate Vallota, Cooperia, and 

 Griffinia, as distinct genera, and pour back the rest into the 

 cauldron of Amaryllidean confusion." — W. H. 



