V" 



246 CLAVIS AGARICINORUM. 



proving that these flower-bearing organs are not bracts, as has been 

 assumed, but abnormal pedicels. The twenty other pedicels are 

 normally developed and bear normally-developed flowers, calyx and 

 corolla being of light green colour. Moreover, whilst the five central 

 pitcher-bearing pedicels ai*e pendulous, the outside ones are horizon- 

 tally protruding. Nothing can be more singular than the appearance 

 of these racemes — pitchers on the pedicels instead of on the leaves, as 

 in Ce/thalotas and Nepenthes ; notliing more singular than the change 

 of the plant from the sterile stage to the fertile. So much were the 

 early botanists puzzled by this, that they referred the plants when 

 sterile to the Ferns, — even Aublct describing M. vmbellata under the 

 name of Polypodium minimum (as is evident from the authentic speci- 

 mens of Sloane and Aublet at the Britisli Museum) . The form of the 

 pitchers in my M. nepenthoides is unlike the long clavate one of M. 

 nmbeUata, and comes nearest to M. IFrighiU, Seem., from Cuba 

 {M. umbellata, Griseb. Plant. Wright, p. 167, non. Linn.), but both 

 species dift'er in leaf, and the rachis of the raceme is more elongated in 

 the Cuban species than in M. nepeidhoides. The whole genus awaits 

 revision, there being many foreign elements mixed with it in herbaria 

 and systematic works; for instance, M. cunei folia, Gardn., belonging 

 to Noroutia, and some sterile specimens to Rubiacea; and Tanmcium. 



In the Chontales mountains, all three genera of 3Iarcgraviacers 

 are represented — Marcgravia, Norontia, and Ruyschia, — where they are 

 generally met with on the outskirts of forests. M. nepenthoides I have 

 met frequently about the Javali Mine, and collected it even on the top 

 of Peiia Blanca, the higlu^st peak of these mountains, conjectured to 

 be about 2500 feet above the sea-level. 



CT.AVrS AGAEICINOEUM : 



an analytical key to the buitish agakfcini, with 

 challacteks of the genera and subgenera. 



By Worthington G. Smith, P.L.S. 



{Read before tlie Woolliope Cluh, Hereford, Fehruary 22nd, 1870.) 



{Concluded from x>oge 223.) 



Genus II. Coprinus, Fr. Epicr. p. 241. — Spores black; margin 

 of pileus straight, at first adpressed to the stem ; stem confluent with 



