344 SEIFRIZ: THE TALIPOT PALM AT PERADENIYA, CEYLON 
Among its several excellent avenues of palms, the Peradeniya 
Gardens in Ceylon have long had an avenue of superb specimens of 
the talipot palm, Corypha umbraculifera. The twenty palms of 
which this avenue formerly consisted were planted im satu in 
1881. In June, 1918, seven of the talipots in the avenue com- 
menced flowering and remained in blossom until the end of the 
year, being at their best in October-November (Fig. 1). At 
the same time there flowered two species of bamboo, Dendro- 
calamus giganteus and D. stricius, and the liane, Bauhinia anguina. 
Bauhinia had never before been seen in blossom at Peradeniya 
(10). It was locally suspected that the drought of January— 
April of that year was the cause of this remarkable case of si- 
multaneous flowering of four species of plants all of whose 
flowering periods occur after many years of purely vegetative 
growth. In substantial support of this belief was the widespread 
occurrence of flowering talipots throughout Ceylon. From one 
observation point on ae island 200 talipots were counted in 
ower. 
When the question of the possibility of drought being the 
cause of the gregarious flowering of the Coryphas at Peradeniya 
in 1918 was discussed in a previous publication (10), it was 
pointed out that the remaining thirteen palms in the avenue 
did not flower, although of the same age and subjected to the 
same environmental conditions. This fact is disturbing to 
either hypothesis of the cause of gregarious flowering. Whether 
we regard the flowering as the result of an environmental stimu- 
lus, or the expression of a heritable tendency, all of the palms 
should have flowered simultaneously since all were of the same 
age and all grew in the same environment. This difficulty, 
however, is easily met on the basis of the hereditary hypothesis. 
If a climatic factor is responsible for gregarious flowering 
in plants, the question arises, How long before the flowering 
does the stimulus occur? In the case of plants of long vegetative 
periods it has been suggested that the stimulus must act at least 
a year before flowering. If this is true, then the drought of 
January-April of 1918, quite aside from the fact that it was 
relatively mild, could not have been the cause of the flowering 
which followed not more than two months later. But conclusions 
reached on the basis of a single instance of flowering are too 
speculative. More convincing deductions can be formed when at 
least two flowerings are considered. 
