174 ORCHIDS OF THE CAPE PENINSULA. 
The colour of the flowers (of the form collected on the Peninsula), 
is greenish, with occasional purple spots. At Houw Hoek I found it 
with pale purple or rosy flowers, with darker purple spots; and at the 
same place another form, with a very long and distantly-flowered 
spike and greenish flowers. The tuber is irregular in shape and some- 
times large, resembling those of the section Herschelia, and the leaves 
also are in some respects like those of the latter group. The species 
is very peculiar, utterly different m appearance from those of the 
section Monadenia (to which it seems otherwise to be allied by its 
single pollinary gland), and also different from any other Disa. To 
get the leaves, which may easily be overlooked, the collector must 
watch for the plant early in the season; the sheath at their base is 
singular, and I have not observed it in any other species. 
VIII.—DISPERIS. 
Swartz, in Kongl. Vetensk. Acad. Nya Handl., vol. xxi (1800), p. 218; 
Benth. & Hook., f., Gen. Plant., vol. iil., p. 633. (Dryopeia, 
Thouars, Orch. Iles. Afr. (1822), t. 1—8; Dipera, Sprengel, Syst. 
Veg. 3 (1826), 676.) 
Odd sepal posticous or sublateral, vaulted or galeate, sometimes 
saccate or with an ascending spur towards its summit, the narrow and 
acute, or more rarely wide petals, agglutinated to its anterior margins. 
Side sepals free, spreading horizontally, or ascending, or more or less 
connate at base, usually obliquely lanceolate, concave, dorsally saccate 
or spurred. Lip ascending along the face of the column and adnate 
to it, between the stigmas or the lobes of the stigma and between the 
arms of the rostellum, narrow below, dilated above into a variously- 
shaped, simple or bi-lobed limb. Column ascending, thick and fleshy; 
the rostellum produced in front into two rigid, cartilaginous, bent or 
twisted, more or less distant arms, which hold at their extremities the 
glands of the pollinia. Clinandrium nearly horizontal or ascending, 
anther-cells distinct, parallel, somewhat approximate; pollinia with the 
granules often (or always ?) secund in a double row on the margins of 
the flattened, subrigid caudicles. Stigma bilobed and situate in front 
of the column, the lobes approximate, pulvinate, or two, lateral and 
distant. Capsule cylindrical, or trigonous, ribbed.—Terrestrial herbs, 
mostly glabrous and slender, with sessile or stalked tubers, and 
radical, or few and distant, narrow, or cordate and amplexicaul leaves. 
Flowers solitary, or few in loose racemes ; bracts herbaceous, moderate 
or large. (Name from %¢, twice, and anpa, a pouch, in allusion to the 
pouches of the side sepals.) 
This genus is one of the most natural and sharply defined amongst 
