150 PEOF. E. J. HAEYEY-GIBSON ON THE MOEniOLOGT 



"The female flowers open first. I found bees visiting the flowers in the orthodox 

 manner ; I caught one and found it covered with pollen. This point I had not been 



able to fix before." 



As already stated, the youngest female flower I could find contained an ovary whose 



ovule had obviously been fertilised. The flower is surrounded,' as in the case of the 



male, by three bracts, the anterior being pointed linear and about one-fourth longer than 



the two latero-posterior, which are pointed ovate. The anterior bract bears very 



numerous unicellular hairs both over the abaxial surface and alons- the margins, while 



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the latero-posterior bracts are ciliate on their margins only. Arising centrally is a 

 circular, transparent disc (" torus " of Harvey), from the cup-like depression in which 

 arises the ovoid or elliptical *' ovary " bearing apically a long filiform style. Just at 



m 



the junction of the ovary and style springs the extremely small cup-shaped perianth 

 gs. 17 & 18). I have examined very many flowers and never found the tubular, 

 trifid form of perianth figured for M. JPolemanni by Harvey. The form of the perianth, 

 on the other hand, invariably resembled that figured by the same author for M. Thomii. 

 The margin of the perianth was, however, not trifid, but was subdivided into six or more 

 lobes of approximately equal size. Finding this deviation from Harvey's figures of the 

 perianth oi M. Folemanni, I at first thought that my material might inclade both species^ 

 but that this w^as not the case was show^n by an examination of male and female flow^ers 

 from the same inflorescence. It will be noted in the diagnoses of the two species given 

 by Harvey that that author separates M. Thomii from M. JPolemanni, on the ground 

 that the former has "anterior bractese broadly oblong" with a ** subglobose, obtusely 



tridentate " female perianth and " somewhat concave " laminae in the male perianth, 

 while M. Folemanni has its '* anterior bractea (in the male flower) spathulate with a 

 narrow claw " and with " very concave " laminae in the segments of the perianth, while 

 the female perianth is " tubular, trifid." The present material seems to combine these 

 characters, for the male flowers have, on the whole, the characters of M. JPolemanni, while 

 the female flowers resemble more closely those of M. Thomii. (The question of 

 identification is discussed below.) 



The perianth cup has a vascular supply consisting of a few very delicate spiral and 

 reticulate tracheids arranged in two or three strands, and the rather regularly arranged 

 oblong cells of which the perianth is mainly composed are filled with " mystrin." 

 Arising from the base of the perianth cup towards its posterior side are two small 

 parenchymatous nodules representing the pair of abortive stamens mentioned by 

 Griffith (fig. 18). They show no histological differentiation and are not present in all 

 flowers. Ko trace of an anterior stamen could be made out after examination of several 

 hundred serial sections of female flowers. The ovary is elliptical and sparsely covered 

 with small unicellular hairs, which apparently drop off soon after fertilisation, for 

 slighter older fruits are quite glabrous. No hairs occur on the perianth. Erom the 

 base of the perianth cup arises the relatively long filiform style. It is, considerably 

 constricted at its point of origin from the ovary (fig. 18), but expands to its normal 

 diameter before reaching the rim of the perianth ; thereafter it maintains a uniform 



