194 BROOM-RAPES, BALANOPHORE®, RAFFLESIACE. 
stratum of vegetable mould. Most of them are the size of a fist, but a few are as 
big as a head, and then weigh 15 kilogr. and more. The tubercles formed directly 
by the germinating seeds which chance upon the roots are, by the time they attain 
to about the size of a pea, already in connection with the wood of the attacked 
root. The cortex and a portion of the wood at the place where the parasite is 
adnate are absorbed by this root. The tissue of the small tuber-stock is squarely 
and firmly inserted into the superficial notch thus made in the root, and short, peg- 
shaped bundles, isolated by the loosening of the wood of the nutrient root, appear 
to grow into the substance of the parasite. As the tuber increases in size vascular 
bundles are developed in it also, and these grow towards the said bundles of the 
host and unite with them. 
No boundary can then any longer be certainly recognized between host and 
parasite, and the strangest fact of all is that we find, in these bundles, cells 
concerning which we are not able to decide, even by reference to their shape, 
whether they belong to the one or to the other. The cells which belong 
undoubtedly to the wood of the nutrient root have dotted walls; the bundles 
unquestionably developed in the parasitic tuber exhibit, on the other hand, cells 
with reticulate thickening, which, when slightly magnified, look as if they were 
transversely striated. Wherever these pitted and reticulate cells meet, cells are 
intercalated which do not altogether correspond either to the pitted variety 
belonging to the host or to the reticulate cells of the parasite, but display a form 
intermediate between the two. Here and there, too, cell-groups belonging to the 
parasite are entirely buried in the wood of the foster-root in its growth, and in 
the older tubers the cellular elements of the two plants there bound together are so 
involved that it is, as has been stated, impossible to establish any line of demarca- 
tion between the two. 
By the time the tubers have reached the size of a fist their cortical layer is 
always solid, corky, and areolated; each of the areas being more or less uniformly 
angled, as is shown in the illustration below. Some of the more protuberant portions 
elongate and grow out into short, thick stumps bearing scales all round, each of 
the little areas having a triangular-pointed scale situated in the middle of it. At 
this stage of development the entire Lophophytum plant has an extraordinary 
resemblance to the squamigerous rhizome of a fern, or to a dwarf cycad-tree, 
stripped of its green leaves; and this likeness is enhanced by the fact that the bark 
and scales of Lophophytum are dark-brown in colour. From the centre of each of 
these thick stumps, which often reach a height of 15 em., there now arises a 
spadiciform inflorescence. At first it is so thickly covered with ovate lanceolate 
scales possessing dark-brown, quasi-horny tips, overlapping one another like tiles, 
that the spadix as a whole looks extremely like an erect cycad-cone. Imagine the 
surprise of a traveller, who chances upon a spot in the depths of a primeval forest 
where the ground 1s occupied by Lophophytwm, upon seeing hundreds of these 
brown, scaly cones grow up suddenly, in the course of a night following some days 
of rain, from the subterranean roots of the trees. A day or two later, this garden 
