Mr. J. Miers on the Meuispermarese. 85 



manifest that it is difficult to conceive how it was possible that 

 such experienced botanists as the authors of the ' Flora Indica ' 

 and the 'Genera Plantarum' refused to acknowledge Diplo- 

 clisia, and why they should have merged it, together with 

 Nephroica and ffolopeira, into Cocculus. In its habit there is 

 nothing resembling a single species of either of those genera ; 

 for the typical plant bears much the appearance of Chondoden- 

 dron tomentosum of the ' Flora Peruviana/ agreeing in its distant, 

 nearly orbicular, large leaves, with crenately sinuated margins, 

 supported upon very elongated slender petioles, and where the 

 nerves as well as their branches terminate in the crenatures of 

 the margin, and do not anastomose, as in all the genera before 

 mentioned. The ^ inflorescence is racemose, long and slender, 

 with short branches bearing from one to three pedicellated 

 flowers ; the ? raceme is still more elongated, quite simple, with 

 extremely lengthened pedicels ; the sepals are ovate and prettily 

 maculated; the petals cuneately rhomboid, with the lateral 

 angles inflexed ; the filaments are much thickened and incurved 

 at the apex, in which is dorsally imbedded a 2-celled anther, 

 which bursts bivalvately by a horizontal fissure : the $ flower 

 has six sterile stamens, a glabrous ovary, with a short thick 

 style, surmounted by a horizontally reflected, one-lipped, nar- 

 rowly cup-shaped stigma with a very crenulated margin. The 

 drupe is oblong, in one species being unusually large ; its puta- 

 men, like that of Tiliacora and Chondodendron, is oblong, 

 greatly compressed, of coriaceous texture, with a carinal peri- 

 phery and a prominent, radiately striated, horseshoe-shaped 

 ring upon the outer edge of each face, leaving a somewhat fal- 

 cate, very deep depression, extending from the base beyond 

 the centre, with a prominent narrow rib down its middle; its 

 condyle is internal, in the form of a linear septum connecting 

 the two opposite hollows in the line of the projecting ribs ; thus 

 it divides the cell nearly into two pouches, giving it the form of 

 a horseshoe with its long legs almost parallel : the seed is there- 

 fore hippocrepiform, not cyclical as in the other genera before 

 mentioned ; the embryo, imbedded in fleshy albumen, partakes 

 of the same form, has linear, strap-shaped, very long, flattened, 

 incumbent cotyledons ; but the radicle is extremely short, some- 

 what conical, a third or a fourth of their breadth, and is in one 

 species only one-eighteenth, in another one-twelfth part of their 

 incurved length. But it is not alone in these extremely dis- 

 similar floral and seminal characters that this incompatibility 

 exists : Diploclisia partakes of the rule which prevails through- 

 out the Menispermacece — that where such differences exist, we 

 may rely on finding a corresponding diversity in the habit of 

 the plants of the genus. These combined circumstances fully 



