•28 THE VICTORIAN NATURALIST. 



For a seaweed collector these rocks form a perfect paradise. 

 All one has to do is to stand on the rock as the tide comes in, 

 and as it creeps upward thousands of specimens float past, fully 

 spread out so as to show all their beautiful shapes, and the 

 collector takes what he requires. When the tide is out the beach 

 forms a lovely road for the cyclist, the four miles being easily 

 covered in twenty minutes. But I ought to warn the intending 

 cyclist that the last few miles of the road to Anglesea is the worst 

 that, at any rate, I have ever travelled. It is composed of very 

 loose sand, into which the tyre sinks. I am speaking more par- 

 ticularly of the road vid Jan Juc, which I was assured was much 

 shorter than that by Torquay. It may be, but oh ! I shall never 

 forget the four hours we spent getting over about eight miles of 

 road between Jan Juc and Anglesea. 



On one fiat near the river I found hundreds of plants of the 

 orchid Dipodium punctatum, so I determined to try and solve 

 the problem of how they obtain their nourishment, but was com- 

 pletely baffled. The ground in which they flourished was so hard 

 that, even with the help of a good-natured resident armed with a 

 pick, we could not find the roots of the gum trees on which they 

 are said to be parasitic. Every plant has a number — in one I 

 counted fourteen — of long tubers, or rather rhizomes. These 

 tubers were of various sizes, from three to ten inches long, the 

 diameter being about half an inch ; they were perfectly smooth, 

 and even with a good lens I could not detect any kind of root. 

 The problem stands thus — the plant has no leaves, only rudimen- 

 tary brown scales ; the stem is not green but red, and apparently 

 there were no roots or suckers attached to another plant. Of 

 course the tubers might take in a certain amount of cell-sap from 

 the soil, also the red colour of the stem might mask chlorophyll, 

 but the surface in both cases is limited, and the plants were very 

 luxuriant. 



Bentham, in the " Flora Australiensis," says nothing about its 

 mode of obtaining nourishment ; but Baron von Mueller, in the 

 " Key to Victorian Plants," says that they live as parasites on 

 roots. Now, I think it would be interesting if some of our 

 members would endeavour to settle the difficulty by examining 

 any plants they come across. The particular roots on which they 

 live might be ascertained. 



One day I took a trip over to Airy's Inlet, a distance of eight 

 miles by the forest road, and as I returned by the coast range I 

 was able to gain a fair knowledge of the plants of the district. I 

 only obtained one rather rare flower, and its rarity only consists 

 in its flowering on the ist January, namely, the orchid Orthoceras 

 strictum. Nearly everywhere were plants of Isopogon ceratophyllus, 

 which I had never seen so plentiful before ; the two Hibbertias 

 were also common, H. stricta and H. fasciculata ; Pimelea 



