BY ALEX. G. HAMILTON. 203 



side slants upwards and outwards from the plane of the others, so 

 as to form guiding walls to the throat of the flower. The petals 

 are bright blue with a greenish-yellow band from the mid-length 

 in the median line. This yellow part in the three centre petals 

 is thickly studded with brush-tipped hairs standing perpendicularly 

 (Fig. 1) ; they are sticky and well adapted to catch pollen. The 

 lateral petals have very few of these hairs. The flower buds are 

 at first closely pressed to the stem of the plant by the leaves, 

 from the axils of which they spring ; but, as the flower progresses, 

 each leaf bends downwards till at last it assumes a horizontal 

 position, and in this movement it is followed by the flower, which 

 is fully open when the horizontal position is reached. In the 

 upper part of the plant, the flower develops before the leaf grows 

 to any size, but even in this case the same movements are gone 

 through, and the leaf, though perhaps smaller than the flower, 

 still gives it support. 



The flower is proterandrous. In the early buds, the style and 

 indusium stand slightly higher than the anthers (Fig. 2), but as 

 the bud matures, the anthers grow rapidly till they overtop the 

 cup (Fig. 3) which is edged with stiff" hairs. The .style then grows 

 upward through the anthers (Fig. 4), and at the same time these 

 dehisce introrsely, and the brush of hairs on the margin of the 

 cup clears the pollen out of them completely, the pollen dropping 

 into the indusium (Fig. 5). This alternation of periods of growth 

 between the style and the anthers is a remarkable feature, and 

 occurs in all the species of the order so far as I am aware, but it 

 appears to have been missed by observers prior to my paper (2) 

 already referred to. The upward growth being very rapid, and 

 the filaments being so elastic as to keep the anthers closely pressed 

 to the cup, the pollen is pretty firmly packed, in which the pressure 

 of the bud on the anthers also assists. The stigma at this stage 

 is immature, at the bottom of the indusium (Fig. 6) and hidden 

 by the grains of pollen. The edges of the cup now approach each 

 other by a flattening of the indusium (Fig. 7), till at last the 

 opening is a narrow slit fringed with hairs (Fig. 8). Up till this 

 time, the style has lain horizontally in the bud, but now it bends 



