10 
posed among the leaves at the base, with long, thread-like styles. 
The other kind of flowers are moncecious, in dense spikes at the 
apex of slender scapes. Staminate flowers imbricated in narrow, 
oblong spikes; stamen of a single, 2-celled anther nearly sessile, in ` 
the axis of a white, linear, petaloid bract longer than itself. Fertile 
flowers imbricated in larger, conical, crowded Spikes, bractless, 
consisting of a I-celled, 1-ovuled ovary which is tipped with a 
capitate stigma; ovules anatropous. Fruit ovoid, costate, indehis- 
cent, thick, membranaceous. Seeds oblong-conical, the raphe 
filiform, inconspicuous ; embryo thick, conical, with an elongated 
cotyledon and short radicle. à 
Natives of western North America, Mexico and equatorial 
South America. One species only is known. 
I. LILA SUBULATA, Humb. et Bonpl. РІ. Asa. 1.222, tab. 63 (1808). 
Heterostylus gramineus, Hook. Fl. Bor. Am. ii. 171 (1840). 
The leaves of this species are not, as described even by so 
careful an observer as Micheli, *grass-like," but as Mr. S. B. 
Parish, of San Bernardino, Cal., writes, cylindrical, about the size 
of a goose quill and filled with spongy cellulose matter which 
causes them to become flat under pressure, and hence very decep- 
tive in herbarium specimens. They are numerous, 8 to 12 inches 
high, erect, tapering to a point at the apex. Scapes 4 to 8 inches 
high, much shorter than the leaves and like them terete. The 
curious basilar flowers produce an enormously long filiform style, 
nearly as long as the scapes, sometimes even 8 inches, and tipped 
with a capitate stigma. They remind me very much of the similar 
flowers and styles of Scirpus supinus var. Най? which 1 once 
found growing at Winter Pond, Winchester, Mass. Their fruit is 
many-ribbed, about 3 lines in length. The flowers of the spikes 
are smaller in size, those of the staminate flowers having abortive 
fertile flowers mixed with them. Micheli quotes Hieronymus as 
saying that the spikes are androgynous, having fertile flowers at 
the base, perfect in the centre and sterile at the apex, but none of 
our North American plants show this so far as I have seen, nor 
does Bonpland, in his original description, seem to have noticed 
such an arrangement. Ovaries in the upper flowers with a short, 
thick style, crowned by a papillose stigma. 
