NOTICES OP NEW OE EAEE GAEDEN PLANTS. 129 



with a small coarse down, that even extends over the flowers, 

 which are yellow, with a narrow corolla folded upon itself by a 

 hend near the middle. 



Brillantaisia owaeiensis. Palisot de Beauvois, Flore d'Oware 

 et de Benin, II. 68, t. 100, fig. 2. Belanthera Belvisiaua. 

 Nees v. Esenbeck in B.C. Prodr., XI. 97. 



This little known, hut conspicuous stove plant, of the order of 

 Acanthads, has been introduced from the West of Africa by 

 Mr. Whitfield, and flowered in February last in the garden of 

 the Society of Apothecaries at Chelsea. It forms a stately 

 herbaceous plant, not very unlike Salvia Sclarea in general appear- 

 ance. The stem four-cornered and somewhat downy. The 

 leaves have a lamina six inches and more long, thin, ovate, heart- 

 shaped and coarsely toothed, slightly covered with a scattered 

 loose down ; their footstalks are rather shorter, winged, toothed 

 towards the lamina, and covered with long coarse hairs. The 

 flowers appear in a loose naked erect hairy terminal panicle, not 

 much longer than the uppermost leaves, with dull purple com- 

 pressed branchlets thinly covered with glandular hairs. Each 

 flower has a pair of bristle-shaped bracts at the base of the calyx, 

 which itself consists of five weak very narrow hairy sepals a little 

 united at the base, and as long as the tube of the corolla ; the 

 fifth sepal is longer than the others. The corolla is rather more 

 than an inch long, two-lipped like a Salvia, with a short tube in- 

 flated in front at the base of the lower lip, which is deep violet, 

 ovate, three-toothed at the point, and marked with three parallel 

 deeper streaks ; the upper lip is erect, falcate, undivided, and 

 like the rest of the flower pale violet. Of stamens, two are 

 fertile, lying in the hollow of the upper lip of the corolla, with 

 filiform naked filaments and narrow erect sagittate anthers ; from 

 the base of the filaments rises another pair of slender, delicate, 

 hairy, abortive stamens, which appear from the inflated orifice 

 of the tube, and bear at their ends crescent-shaped rudiments 

 of anthers. The ovary stands on a circular red disk, is covered 

 with long silky hairs, and contains a great number of ovules ; the 

 stigma is subulate, curved, with a small back tooth. 



It is scarcely to be doubted that Mr. Bentham is right in 

 identifying Nees v. Esenbeck s Belanthera with the Brillantaisia 

 of Palisot. be the cause what it may of the conspicuous though 



