Plants, and Parthenogenesis. 91 



cell is elongated, oblong, whilst I feel obliged to call it oval if 

 I indicate its form according to the principles of nomenclature 

 given by Linnaeus and employed by the best authors, and as, 

 moreover, it is in fact represented by Braun*. Moreover the 

 mode of attachment of the anther to the filament, as described 

 by Braun, differs from what I have found and represented ; for 

 he says the filament is very short, and aflfixed in a joint -like 

 manner to the inner side of the connective. If this relation of 

 the parts be true, and not an error in description, like that above 

 noticed of " elongated, oblong," the cause of this assertion of 

 Braun would in truth appear to be that the male organs examined 

 could not have been those of C. ilicifolia of the Gardens of Kew 

 and Berlin : for no example of a species is known to me having 

 both those modes of attachment of the anther on the filament 

 severally described by myself and Braun ; in short, according to 

 the prevailing notions of generic characters, plants so formed 

 would belong to two distinct genei'a. 



Since I have not had the opportunity of examining the male 

 flowers of Ccelebogyne from Hooker's herbarium, I am unable to 

 decide this point; we must therefore wait until Hooker, or some 

 botanist familiar with the morphology of plants and with these 

 particular inquiries, can give us an account of the true state of 

 the case f. 



This doubt, whether the male flowers of Ccelebogyne examined 

 by Braun and myself were equivalent, would necessarily extend 

 to the further account given by Braun of the female flowers of this 

 plant, had I not thoroughly assured myself that I had the same 

 individual specimens before me that Braun himself investigated, 

 — a fact which does not appear, even in the case of the female 

 flowers, from the descriptions of them given by Braun, but 

 rather the contrary. 



Thus, Braun describes the calyx of the female flower of the 

 Ccelebogyne of the Berlin Botanic Garden to be deeply five- 

 cleft (quinquepartitus), and rarely four-cleft (quadripartitus), 

 whereas I, on the contrary, found the calyx to consist of five 

 completely-separated, distinct sepals, imbricated in vernation; 

 the leaflets never coalesced (gamosepalous), five-cleft (quinque- 

 partitus), nor lobed, as Braun further terms it in his German 

 description. Moreover in the same place he speaks of the 



* The long diameter of the anther is not double its transverse diameter, 

 and it is rounded, not pointed, — wherefore we must call it oval, according 

 to Linnaeus (Philosophia Bot. 1751, p. 42), Willdeuow (Grundriss der 

 Krauterkunde, p. 78), and Bischoff (Handbuch der bot. Terminologie und 

 Systemkunde, p. 74). 



t I am, however, convinced that Braun's faulty description has alone 

 given rise to this doubt ; Decaisne {Ann. des Sciences Naturelles, vol. vii. 

 1857) has already corrected Braun's statement on this point. 



