156 ‘Rev. R. T. Lowe on a new Species of Convolvulus. 
with quite small and inconspicuous leaves and flowers in pro- 
portion to its size, like some closely-browsed or clipped-down 
thorny bush, and of the shape exactly of a miniature Stone- 
Pine (Pinus Pinea, L.). Root woody, very hard and stiff, nearly 
or quite simple and tap-shaped, covered with a rugged, longitu- 
dinally-striated, brown bark, and from the thickness of the 
little finger to that of the thumb at the crown, where it imme- 
diately divides into a dense mass of very short, stiff, woody, 
closely interlacing and entangled branches, forming a very hard, 
rigid, spinous, cushion-like, grey, flattened head, convex in the 
centre, from 3 or 4 to 18 inches in diameter, and from 1 to 6 
inches thick in the middle; so hard, compact, and woody, that 
it will often bear the weight of a man standing or even stamping 
on it, without yielding or sensible disfigurement. Young shoots 
originating chiefly from within or beneath the roof-like cushion 
or pileus formed by the older, outwardly-knobbed, spurred and 
stunted, interlacing branches; straight, hard, stiff, rigid, spine- 
like, seldom more than 1 or 2 inches long, round, terete, sharp, 
and hard-pointed, finely and evenly striate longitudinally, very 
finely and minutely cinereo-puberulous. Leaves 2 to 5 or 6 
lines long, and 3-1 line broad, thickish in substance, subcon- 
duplicate, clothed with adpressed silky-grey hairs, linear-oblong, 
subspathulate, obtuse. Flowers pretty, but small and rather 
inconspicuous, solitary, axillary, subsessile in the axils of the 
leaves on the young shoots, light rose-pink or purple, much 
resembling those of C. arvensis, L., but. very much smaller, 
being only 4 or 5 lines in diameter. Calyx bracteolate; sepals 
and the adpressed bractlets oblong, short, one-third or one-fourth 
the length of the corolla, silky grey. Corolla 5 or 6 lines in 
diameter, three or four times the length of the bracts and sepals, 
funnel-shaped, 5-angular, and outwardly silky-pubescent in five 
longitudinal rays or narrow acuminate stripes. 
The flowers continued to expand successively for several weeks 
after the plants had been deposited in a basket kept in a dry 
place,—deriving probably, whilst growing in those arid wastes, 
their chief supply of moisture from the air, and depending only 
secondarily upon the soil. Indeed, at this moment, though more 
than a year and a half has elapsed since they were rooted up, — 
they look very much the same as when actually growing. 
I was informed by a Spanish gentleman in the house of my 
kind and hospitable friend Don Ramon Paez, at Puerto de 
Cabras, in Fuerteventura, that in Spain the name “ Chaparro ” 
designates some species of dwarf shrubby oak. 
Specimens of entire plants of Convolvulus caput-Meduse have 
been placed in the Banksian and Hookerian herbaria. 
Lea Rectory, Aug. 6, 1860. 
