46 Remarks on the Natural order Cycadee. 
where to place it; for we find it first arranged by him among the 
Palms, and afterwards with the Ferns. It was not until the year 
1807, after the suggestions of Ventenat, that the natural order of 
Cycadez was established, it having been first characterized by the 
elder Richard, in Persoon’s Synopsis Plantarum. 
C. revoluta, though of late years well known in the fine living 
collections of England and the Continent, appears to have produ- 
ced its flowers but rarely. The description and plate,* by Sir J. E. 
Smith, taken from a specimen which flowered in the hot-houses of 
the Bishop of Winchester in 1779, and the plant at Wentworth 
House, mentioned as being in a state of inflorescence in 1829, by 
Sir Wm. J. Hooker, and figured in the Botanical Magazine,+ (both 
of which notices are now considered imperfect in their views of the 
structure of the stem and seeds,) are all that have come under our 
observation. 
in Japan, the native country of this species, its curious fructifica- 
tion is, we believe, renewed annually ; and the Japanese, who make 
considerable plantations of it around their houses, are said to eat the 
se extract an inferior kind of sago from the pith or central 
part of the stem; whence it has received the name of Sago Palm, 
although the true sago of the shops is the production of a very dif- 
ferent plant, the Sagus Rumphii, Willd., which is a true Palm. 
According to Dr. Hamilton,t the flour used by the poorer natives of 
Malabar, called Indum Podz, is prepared from the seeds of a species 
of Cycas, dried and beaten in a mortar. 
For a long time, those who examined this group of plants seem 
to have been more occupied with their external appearance, as ex- 
hibited in the fine pinnated foliage and simple trunk of Cycas, than 
with any minute investigation of the real nature of the reproductive 
organs. When, however, the plants of this order were attentively 
examined as to their germination, their mode of inflorescence, and 
especially as to the nature of those singular bodies denominated the 
female flowers, new light was thrown upon their characters and aflin- 
ities. To that learned and most accurate botanist, Robert Brown, 
we are mainly indebted for those views which explain the true struc- 
ture of Cycadez, and establish an intimate relationship with the ap- 
parently very different group of plants, known under the name of Co- 
. These views were presented to the world in a paper read be- 
fore the Linnean Society of London, in 1825, on the “ structure of 
Trans. Linnzan Soc. of London, vol. vi, p. 312. 
+ Bot. Mag. tab, 2963. + Travels in the Mysore, vol. ii, p. 469. 
