129 



ON ANOMOCLADA, A NEW GENUS OF HEPATICJE, AND 

 ON ITS ALLIED GENERA, 0B0NT08CHI8MA AND 

 ADELANTHU8. 



By Richakd Spruce, Ph.D., F.R.G.S., &c. 



In August, 1852, when I was at the cataracts of Panurd, on the 

 large river Uaupes, a few miles north of the equator, busily occupied 

 in collecting the magnificent forest- vegetation, and not unmindful of 

 the Cryptogamia which flourished under the shade of the trees, and 

 chiefly on the decaying prostrate trunks of their predecessors, I fell in 

 with a Hepatic which greatly interested me. It spread over decay- 

 ing wood in broad, compact, yellow-green patches, and from its 

 rampant habit, its postical subaphyllous rooting flagella, and the 

 insertion and texture of its leaves, it was plainly an ally of the 

 common Jungermannia {Odontoschisma) Sphagni oi our boggy heaths; 

 and the comparison was rendered easier by the fact that the very 

 Jungermannia Sphagni grew close by — not on rotting wood, but at the 

 base and on the exposed roots of growing trees — a fact the more note- 

 worthy because it is the only instance known to me of a Moss or 

 Hepatic abounding in^the north temperate zone and also in'the hot forest 

 plains of the equator. The new species differed from the old in its 

 larger, longer leaves, much crisped on their under edge, so that a 

 stem, viewed from beneath, appeared crested, very much as in the cris- 

 tate Plagiocliilce (P. cristata, hypnoides, &c.) ; and more essentially in 

 the leafy branches and the female flowers springing from the iipper face 

 of the stem, and not from the under , as all the branches and flowers 

 do in Odontoschisma and some other allied genera (whence my name 

 for it, Anomoclada) ; but, above all, in the patches being always 

 suffused with mucilage, which I at first took for an extraneous and 

 probably tremelloid growth, but finding it constantly present, not 

 only in that locality, but in many others where I found the plant 

 during the two following years, viz., at San Carlos del Rio Negro, on 

 the Casiquiari, the Alto Orinoco, and in the Montana de Javita (Hum- 

 boldt's " Portage of Pimichin," where I was at last fortunate enough 

 to find it in fruit), I was forced to the conclusion that the mucus 

 exuded from the plant itself. It did not swell out into a jelly-like 

 mass as a Tremella would have done, but looked rather as if the plant 

 had been liberally smeared with gum arabic by means of a brush. 

 Although I took up, with cloths, as much of the mucus as I could, the 

 specimens still adhered so firmly to paper, especially by their under 

 side, as not to be detached without tearing away portions of it. 



So soon as I could spare time I tried to trace this mucous secretion 

 to its origin. In the first place, there was plainly none from the upper, 

 N.s. VOL. 5. [Mat, 1878.] k 



