SUPPRESSION OR ABORTION. 275 



cessive suppressions, might be drawn from plants of the Euphor- 

 biaceous Family. Among them are complete and perfect flowers, 

 incomplete and perfect flowers, and achlamydeous and separated 

 flowers, both monoecious and dioecious. Of these, the staminate 

 flowers in some species are reduced to a single stamen, either ses- 

 sile or on a pedicel, in the axil of a bract ; and the pistillate either 

 to one simple pistil, or to a compound pistil formed of two or three 

 simple ones combined. A cluster of such axillary achlamydeous 

 flowers, each of a single stamen, collected at the base of the pedi- 

 cel of a terminal achlamydeous pistillate flower of three coalescent 

 pistils, and surrounded by an involucre, the several leaves of 

 which are coalescent below into a kind of cup, forms the inflo- 

 rescence of Euphorbia, which, until explained by Mr. Brown, was 

 mistaken for a single anomalous blossom (Fig. 344-349). 



485. Abortive or unusually shaped petals were called NECTARIES 

 by the earlier botanists, whether they secreted honey or had a 

 glandular apparatus, or not. This name was applied to the five 

 spur-shaped petals of the Columbine (Ord. Ranunculacese), where 

 the floral envelopes are symmetrical and regular, all the petals 

 being alike, although of an extraordinary form ; and also to the 

 four reduced and deformed petals of the unsymmetrical and irreg- 

 ular flower of the Larkspur, where two of the petals are spur-shaped 

 and received into the conspicuous spur of the calyx, while the other 

 pair' are of a different and more normal form. In the 

 nearly related Aconite, where three of the five petals are 

 obliterated, the two that remain (the nectaries as they 

 have been called) have assumed a shape so remarkable 

 (Fig. 350), that their real nature could only be recognized 

 by the position they occupy. Their appearance is rather 

 that of a deformed stamen. A sterile or deformed sta- 

 men, destitute of an anther, or a body that occupies the 

 normal place of a stamen, or is intermediate in appear- 

 ance and situation between a petal and a stamen, is 

 sometimes called a STAMINODIUM (literally a stamen-like 

 body). Staminodia occur naturally and uniformly in 

 many plants. In cultivated semi-double flowers, such 

 transition states are extremely common, as in the Lark- 

 spurs, Columbines, &c., of the gardens. 



FIG. 350. One of the two deformed, stamen-shaped petals of Aconitum uncinatum. 



