SIR JOSEPH HOOKER LANKESTER. 597 



This blessed angola plant has proved even more wonderful than I expected — 

 figures vous a Dicotyledonous embryo, expanding like a dream into a huge 

 broad woody brown disk, eight years old and of texture and surface like an 

 overdone loaf, 5 feet diam. by 11 high above the ground, and never growing 

 higher, and whose two cotyledons become the two and only two leaves the 

 plant ever has, and these each a good fathom long. From the edges of this 

 disk above the two leaves, rise branched annual pannicles, bearing cones some- 

 thing like pine cones, which contain either all female flowers, or all herma- 

 phrodite flowers ; the hermaphrodite flowers consist of one naked ovule 

 absolutely the same as of Ephedra, in the organic axis of the flower, sur- 

 rounded by six stamens and a four-leaved perigone. The female flower is 

 quite different. 



Lastly, fancy my joy at discovering the key to the development of this 

 hypertrophical embryo taking to become a plant after the fashion it does ; and 

 at my being able to show that * * * it is undoubtedly a member of the 

 family Gnetaceae amongst Gymnosperms, as the structure of the ovule and 

 development of the seed and embryo clearly show. It is out of all question 

 the most wonderful plant ever brought to this country — and the very ugliest 

 It reopens the whole question of Gymnosperms as a class, and will (in the 

 eyes of most) raise these, as I always said they would be raised, to equivalence 

 in these respects with Angiosperms. 



At this moment he was fortunate enough to receive five splendid 

 specimens from a Mr. Monteiro, of Loanda, who " like a trump " sent 

 down the coast at his request to get them. Much help, he says, was 

 given by one of his staff, Professor Oliver, who had been examining 

 the tissues where he had left off, making " some charming drawings 

 that will save me a world of trouble." The completed monograph 

 was read at the Linnaean Society in December, 1862, and published 

 in the " Transactions." The reaction after a heavy and exciting 

 piece of work set in, as so many ardent investigators know it has a 

 way of doing. When it was finished he wrote to Darwin : 



My wife went to Cambridge and enjoyed it ; I stayed at home (and enjoyed 

 it), working away at " Welwitschia " every day and almost every night. I 

 entirely agree with you, by the way, that after long working at a subject, 

 and after making something of it, one invariably finds that it all seems dull, 

 flat, stale, and unprofitable. This feeling, however, you will observe, only 

 comes (most mercifully) after you really have made out something worth 

 knowing. I feel as if everybody must know more of Welwitschia than I do, 

 and yet I can not but believe I have, ill or well, expounded and faithfully 

 recorded a heap of the most curious facts regarding a single plant that have 

 been brought to light for many years. The whole thing is, however, a dry 

 record of singular structures, and sinks down to the level of the dullest descrip- 

 tive account of dead matter beside your jolly dancing facts anent orchid-life 

 and bee-life. I have looked at an orchid or two since reading the orchid 

 book, and feel that I could never have made out one of your poiuts, even 

 had I limitless leisure, zeal and material. I am a dull dog, a very dull dog. 

 I may content myself with the per contra reflection that you could not (be 

 dull enough to) write a " Genera Plantarum " which is just what I am best 

 fitted for. I feel that I have a call that way and you the other. 



136650°— 20 39 



