Ant 
Mr. Farquharson has supplied the following notes with regard to 
the growth of the fungus in Nigeria. 
This fungus is widely distributed throughout the colony and most 
probably along the West African coast. It is perhaps the most 
characteristic and the ti striking ai to be seen in the dry season 
when the natives fire the bush clearings in the making of their farms. 
During the dry season (November to March at Ibadan) rain falls but 
seldom, but not infrequently the nights are marked by heavy dews, 
when the night temperature may fall rather low, to 60 F.° or even is 
“The fungus flora of burnt wood is not very extensive, but this fo 
seems to have specialised in this direction. The charred wood, one 
distance. My own first acquaintance with it was when I saw it from 
the train as we went up Sig on my first arrival in the colony. The 
moisture requirement of t must be extremely small, and the 
rapidity of its sabanines on a freshly burnt substratum is quite 
extraordinary. 
“Tt is seen with far less frequency in the wet season, but is common 
on cast-away corn cobs from which the corn has been eaten. It 
proved a nuisance one season on bags of ground cassava. All <inds 
of plantation trash, especially if charred, afford suitable substrata.” 
e fungus is remarkable for the varying size and form of the conidia, 
and for the ease with which the hyphae break up into their constituent 
cells. At roy it ones of a loose powdery mass of conidia and 
hyphal segments, v: in diameter from 5 » to 20». It is nota 
typical Monilia, bik the Resiashen hyphae place it in this genus rather 
than in Oospora. 
XVI.—NOTES ON AFRICAN COMPOSITAE: IV. 
J. HurcHinson. 
Matricaria, Linn., and Chrysanthemum, DC. 
In a previous contribution* the necessity for a change in our con- 
ception of the genera Pentzia and Matricaria, based chiefly on their 
probable phyletic development in response to the peculiar climatic 
conditions in South Africa, has been shown ; and the discoid species 
of Matricaria were accordingly transferred to Pentzia. It is gene 
that Pentzia as thus defined has arisen directly from Matrica 
entire suppression of ray-flowers, the usually shrubby habit, ae the 
vughly xerophytic type of leaf of the majority of the species of Pentzia, 
eem to point strongly in support of this hypothesis. A continuation 
of this line of descent may be clearly traced onwards to the considerable 
uth African genus Athanasia, through the remarkably close relation- 
ship of Pentzia pinnatifida Harv., and Athanasia acerosa, | Harv. The 
genus, with only a single representative in Tropical Africa, and that 
not farther north than the Zambesi delta, suggests that the South 
* Kew Bull., 1916, 241. 
