MECONOPSIS. 
and both dying after they have produced them. Even this plant has 
been M. nipalensis, Hooker, fil. (in Bot. Mag., T. 5585), as well as the 
M. paniculata of Flora and Sylva. By any name it may smell as little ; 
but there seems no reason why it should not wear the right one. 
M. rudis (M. racemosa, Franchet, 1886; sinuata Prattii, Prain.)\— 
This, like M. racemosa, must be shut into the fold of M. horridula. 
It replaces this last in Yunnan and Szechuan, and differs first of all 
from MM. sinuata and aculeata in having its pointed green leaves 
beset with straw-coloured bristles. These leaves soon wither away 
at the base of the plant ; their under surface is pale, and at their edge 
they are almost entire, instead of being feathered into deep lobes. Up 
rises from the rosette a fat cylindric stalk, of 18 inches or more, leafy 
two-thirds of the way up and then bare, and breaking into a loose spire 
of smooth clear-blue flowers, with a generous fluff of golden anthers at 
their heart, and built of some five to eight petals. Its much longer 
style separates M. rudis from M. -horridula, and its rich yellow 
anthers from M. Prattiit. See Appendix for M. Pratti. 
M. simplicifolia is to M. grandis as M. horridula to M. racemosa. 
That is to say, that here again there is no stalk and no spike, but the 
large (but rather smaller) purple or blue blossoms spring straight 
from the neck of the stock, each on their own stems of about a foot high 
(though sometimes twice as much in fruit) and three or four in number. 
The plant, apart from the colour of the flowers, has a general resem- 
blance to M. pseudintegrifolia, but wears the big Cambrica-like capsule of 
M. grandis. And M. simplicifolia Baileyi is quite the most gorgeous 
of the single-bloomed Meconopsids, with big flowers of dazzling azure. 
M. sinuata replaces M. horridula in the Eastern Himalaya. It 
differs from M. aculeata, of which it is a very close relative, in nothing 
but in having its leaves irregularly and much less deeply lobed, and also 
a narrowly obconical capsule instead of a nearly round one. Other- 
wise, stature, spike, fovr-petalled flowers, coerulean tone of crumpled 
silk, all are the same, as are also the needs and the character. And 
here, in a clouded and complicated group of Meconopsids, where all 
the species are armed with stiff bristles, it may help the seekers after 
clear thought if I recapitulate. There are probably only two main 
species or aggregates instead of five: (a) M. aculeata, loose-spiked, 
with leaves feathered into very deep lobes on either side, and four- 
petalled flowers and a nearly rownd capsule ; with a sub-species, M. 
sinuata, whose leaves are not nearly so deeply lobed, but rather merely 
waved into bays, with the same four-petalled flowers and a narrow 
obconical capsule ; (b) M. racemosa, with many-petalled flowers and no 
stems at all, but the blossoms springing each on its long foot-stalk 
(1,919) 481 2H 
