322 TRANSACTIONS OF THE [Skss. lxxxiii 



P. montamts, Presl (Mexico, Peru). — " =P. mexleanus, 

 Ar. Benn." This can hardly be. Why should Presl in 

 Herb. Prague ! name it P. peruviana if he had named it 

 montanus before i 



P. muricatus, Hagst. — The Walcha (N.S. Wales) plant 

 is too near sulcatus, Ar. Benn., but others no doubt belong- 

 to it from Victoria (Australia), and specimens in the British 

 Museum herbarium from "Mauritius, 1819, Sir James 

 M'Grigor," evidently belong to it. This last sheet is the 

 only one I have seen in any herbarium from Mauritius. I 

 made a drawing of this, and the author's drawing might 

 well have been a copy of mine. The specimens, three in 

 number, are named " P. lucenn with floating leaves." In 

 my MS. notes on these I have written, " If this is not P. 

 sulcatus, Ar. Benn., or P. tricarinatus, Muell. et Benn., 

 then it will be a new species." It is a remarkable dis- 

 tribution, from tlie Mauritius to Australia, " but some of 

 the reptiles and insects have Australian affinities, . . . 

 hence we find comparatively few cases in which groups of 

 Madagascar plants have their only allies in such distant 

 regions as America and Australia" (Wallace, Isl. Life, ed. 

 2, 442, 1892). Another interesting fact is that the leaves 

 of these specimens are of what may be termed the leathery 

 texture of the floating leaves of the Australian species. 

 Wallace (I.e.) further remarks : " There is no portion of the 

 globe that contains within itself so many and such varied 

 features of interest connected with geographical distribu- 

 tion as Madagascar and the smaller islands which 

 surround it." 



P. reduncus, Hagst. (W. Australia). — The author says 

 that I named a specimen of this P. Drummondii, Benth. 

 How this came about I cannot now tell, but Herr Baagoe 

 must have made some mistake or sliifted labels. The only 

 specimens of Druinrnondii I ever had were half the whole 

 collection sent me by the late l^aron von Mueller, and these 

 were the only ones in Europe (except the ones at Kew 

 from which Ijentham descr-ibed the species). And the 

 plant is abundantly distinct from any other, having ulva- 

 like submerged leaves, as noted in the V\. Aust., vii, 171 

 (1878). 



P. nodosus, Lamarck = P. Americanus, C. et. S. — A 



