174 Mr. J. Miers on the Calyceracee. 
XXVI.—On the Calyceraceex. 
By Joun Miers, F.R.S., F.L.S. &e. 
Tue small order of the Calyceracee is little known : it is, how- 
ever, of great interest to the systematic botanist, because it con- 
stitutes the connecting link between the extensive family of the 
Composite and the contiguous orders of the Dipsacee and 
Valerianacee. It exhibits also many points of structure which 
are exceedingly curious. 
It was first instituted as a distinct family by Mr. Robert 
Brown, under the title of the Calyceree, in a memoir read. before 
the Linnean Society in Feb. 1816, when, with his extraordinary 
acumen, that most distinguished of botanists was able to deter- 
mine, from very incomplete specimens, its principal and most 
essential characters. Nearly about the same time, Cassini, while 
engaged in numerous investigations in the family of the Compo- 
site, noticed, in the genera Calycera and Boopis, a considerable 
difference of structure; he therefore separated them into a 
small order, for which he proposed the name of Boopide. This 
memoir was read before the French Academy in August of the 
same year. 
From the admirable remarks of Mr. Brown on this subject *, 
and the subsequent very complete analysis by M. Richard, in 
1820+, of the whole family, which then consisted of only five 
species, representing three genera, we possess nearly all the 
information hitherto published respecting the structure of the 
order. A few years later (in 1831) Lessing described two new 
species from Sellow’s Brazilian collections, and also two others 
brought from Chile by Poppig: the characters of these last were 
afterwards given in fuller detail by Poppig himself in 1835 f. 
These descriptions added nothing to our previous knowledge 
of the structure of the order. DeCandolle, in the following 
year (1836), gave, in his ‘ Prodromus,’ a monograph of the 
whole family, and in a very succinct manner gave the characters 
of the ten species (all then known), which he arranged under 
four genera. Some years ago, I proposed the genus Nastanthus, 
the type of which I found in the Cordillera of Chile in 1825, | 
and of which I then made a drawing with structural details ; 
since then I have added ten other species to this genus. I also 
‘indicated the existence of another new genus, Anomocarpus, 
which I had long before founded upon a plant of Cuming’s 
collection in Chile, to which I now add six other species. The 
genus Leucocera of Turczaninow§ is inadmissible, as it rests 
* Linn. Trans. xii. p. 135. + Mém. Mus. vi. p. 75. 
{ Nov. Gen. et Spec. i. p. 21, tab. 33 & 34. 
§ Bot. Zeitung, xxxi. p. 712. 
