40 EXOCARPOS-TREES OR NATIVE CHERRY-TREES. 
V.—THE EXOCARPOS-TREES OR NATIVE CHERRY- 
TREES 
AND ALLIED PLANTS. 
Aso the principal of these kinds of trees received its generic 
name first from the French naturalist La Billardiére, during 
D’Entrecasteaux’s Expedition. It was our common Exocarpos 
cupressiformis, which he described, and which has been mentioned 
so often in popular works as a cherry-tree, bearing its stone 
outside of the pulp. That this crude notion of the structure of 
the fruit is erroneous, must be apparent on thoughtful contempla- 
tion, for it is evident at the first glance, that the red edible part 
of our ordinary Exocarpos constitutes merely an enlarged and 
succulent fruit-stalklet (pedicel), and that the hard dry and 
greenish portion, strangely compared to a cherry-stone, forms the 
‘real fruit, containing the seed. Nevertheless La Billardiére 
availed himself of the vernacular name, by which the Exocarpos 
attained early and almost miraculous fame, for finding a generic 
appellation for it, the Greek word indicating a position of the 
seed outside of the fruit. The cypress-like Exocarpos, as the tree 
ought to be called rationally, is of wide dispersion through our 
colony except the desert, where it is replaced by another species. 
The tree ranges from South Australia to Queensland and extends 
also to Tasmania. It is never tall. Its leaves are reduced to 
minute scales, but alternate and are never arranged in whorls like 
those of our Casuarinas and Sandarac-Pines, although the habitual 
resemblance of all these trees is great. The flowers are exceed- 
ingly small, mostly bisexual, consist of five segments, and are 
arranged in short spikes or small clusters, one only as a general 
rule advancing into fruit on each little inflorescence. The five 
anthers are seated on very short but comparatively broad filaments, 
and are placed opposite (not alternate) to the segments of the 
flower; the cells of the anthers are divergent and open longitu- 
dinally. The stigma is sessile and bilobed. The fruit, raised 
on the brilliant-red stalklet, contains one erect seed; the latter 
