49 



THE INDIAN SPECIES OF ERIOCAULON. 



BY 



P. F. FYSON, B.A., F.L.S. 



Presidency College, Madras. 



The difficulty of identifying from published descriptions the 

 species of EKIOCAULON found in South India led me finally to at- 

 tempt a revision of the Indian species from material available in the 

 herbaria of this country. A full account with photographs of the 

 type or other sheet of most of the species will appear in the Becords of 

 the Botanical Survey of India, but as it seems probable that it will not 

 be published for some considerable time, a short resume now may 

 not be out of place, and may perhaps be of assistance to collectors of 

 this difficult genus. 



The genus was monographed in Das Pflanzenreich in 1903, by 

 Kuhland, who separated and arranged the species according to the 

 number of the parts in each whorl of the flower, to the geographical 

 distribution (Old and New Worlds) and to minor characters of vari- 

 ous kinds. Taking only the species which occur in India it appears 

 to me that they fall naturally into eight groups, or sub-genera, in each 

 of which a tendency to reduction of the floral parts continually 

 shows itself, so that Euhland's arrangement according to the number 

 of the parts and the perfection of the flower cuts across the natural 

 groupings. The arrangement in the Flora of British India follows 

 in some respects more natural lines, but too much stress is laid in 

 most of the descriptions on unimportant characters, and the posses- 

 sion by some species of white or yellow anthers, instead of the more 

 usual black, is altogether ignored. 



The least modified species appear to be glabrous plants with 

 short discoid stem, narrow leaves, and peduncles bearing heads of 

 male and female flowers, each subtended by a black slightly hairy 

 floral bract ; and having in the male three sepals combined into a 

 spathe-like calyx split on the upper side, a funnel-shaped corolla with 

 three equal lobes and six stamens with black anthers ; and in the 

 female three equal, boat-shaped sepals, three equal oblanceolate ciliate 

 petals, a superior ovary with three one-seeded lobe3, and a three-fid 

 style. From this fairly primitive type development appears to have 

 proceeded along several different lines to produce groups of species as 

 follows : — 



I. SIMPLICES. Land or water-plants with the characters given 

 above. Some of the species have (a) glabrous, some {b) villous recep- 



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