PHYSIOLOGY OF THE RED MANGROVE. 617 



inner faces are thickly supplied with unicellular hairs. These hairs 

 have been shown in the illustrations of Baillon,'*^ but in most of his 

 other diagrams there are great errors, as Warming, who has done 

 most excellent \vork on the species, is careful to point out. In the 

 bud the petals are slightly curved down over the tips of the anthers. 

 The tissue of the petals does not contain trichoblasts, but the cells 

 do contain protoplasmic constituents, which take stains more readily 

 than the cells of the other parts of the flower. 



The eight anthers are almost sessile and at the base of the very 

 short filaments there is a ring of nectary glands (see Fig. i, PI. \"I.), 

 which secretes abundant nectar that is eagerly collected by insects. 

 In sections these nectar glands are seen as dense deeply stained 

 masses which have delicate vascular connections with the strand 

 which passes up into the anther and also into the petals. The 

 anthers, as mentioned before, are multilocular, and this feature has 

 been described by many previous botanists. Griffith'" early gave 

 a good description of the method of dehiscence by the pulling away 

 of the valves and exposing the core filled wath loculi, " resembling 

 Viscum in this circumstance." Goebel'^ describes such chambers 

 in the anthers of Gaiira and Clarkia in the Onagracese and regards 

 them as the homologues of the trabeculse of the sporangia in Isoctes, 

 their function being to nourish the sporogenous tissue. Wight'" 

 also gives a very clear description of this form of pollen arrange- 

 ment and dehiscence and figures it in another place. ^° 



The anther on close examination has two introrse faces and the 

 two slight grooves down the length of these faces, where the thin 

 exothecial membrane ruptures and then rolls back in ordinary 

 anthers. The pollen alveoli are small round cavities embedded in 

 the connective tissue, which is much enlarged in these anthers. The 

 two delicate channels on the faces of the anthers finally disappear 

 with the growth of the tissue in many cases and dehiscence may be 

 by a suture at the medial line or at their lateral lines. 



Warming has pointed out the two special features in the f orma- 



"6 Baillon, H., " Natural History of Plants," Vol. VI., Fig. 256. 



■' Griffith, W., loc. cit, PI. 640, Fig. 11. 



's Goebel, K., " Organographie der Pflanzen," p. 731, 1898. 



^9 Wight, Robt., " Illustrations of Indian Botany," Vol. i, 207, 1840. 



80 Wight, Robt., " Icones Plant. Indise Orient," i, tab. 238-240. 



