550 Cereus senilis. 



perfect puzzle. Mr. Harris, with the laudable view of making 

 it generally known, made a present of it to Mr. Lambert, in 

 whose museum, in Lower Grosvenor Street, it may now be seen 

 every Saturday. Here it has created a considerable interest, 

 but yet it has been a puzzle to the cognoscenti, both foreign and 

 domestic. It has been variously named ; some call it lady's 

 muff, some the Mexican lamb, some the vegetable sheep, &c. &c. 

 Mr. Harris now becoming very desirous to clear up this puzzle, 

 and to procure, if possible, a living specimen of this muff^ forth- 

 with wrote to his Mexican collector, and to J. Parkinson, Esq., 

 our consul-general at Mexico, giving them a carte blanche to 

 procure it, dead or alive. Through the indefatigable exertions of 

 Mr. Parkinson, I am now enabled to state that the muff, 

 sheep, or lamb, so called, is really the flowering top of what has 

 hitherto been described as Cereus senilis. I am also enabled 

 to state, having three specimens of this puzzler before me, that, 

 according to the definition of botanists, the Cereus senilis is no 

 Cereus at all, but a downright, or rather an upright, Echino- 

 cactus senilis. It now appears that at a certain age the Cereus 

 senilis throws out a tuft of wool from each tubercle on its 

 angles, in a zone below the summit of the plant ; these tufts of 

 wool are generally an inch in diameter, and from 2^ in. to 3 in. 

 long. From the closeness of the angles and tubercles, these tufts 

 form a dense and very compact mass of woolly matter, inter- 

 spersed with the rough hairs peculiar to the species. When 

 18 in. or 2 ft. of the top of a plant in this flowering state are cut 

 off, and the fleshy portion scooped out of the centre, they give 

 a fair representation of a lady's muff. 



The tufts of wool stand at right angles with the axis of the 

 plant, and in the centre of each tuft a flower is produced, so 

 that this species flowers in zones under the summit of the plant, 

 in the manner that the greater portion of the mammillarias flower. 

 The flowers are those of a true Echinocactus, and probably not 

 so large as those of E. cornigera ; the sepals become rigid, 

 and, as the flowers fade, the petals fold inwards, or are what a 

 botanist would call convolute; the remains of the sepals form a 

 stiff horny tube, about an inch long, on the top of the seed- 

 vessel. These tubes want the imbrications peculiar to the tubes 

 of Echinocactus. By some defect in the pollen, or stigma, or, 

 perhaps, by the style being longer than the stamen, and the 

 flowers being produced in a horizontal position, the fertilis- 

 ation of the seeds very seldom takes place in this curious 

 species ; and this may account for the scarcity of the plant. 

 Out of several hundreds of flowers produced on our specimens, 

 I only found two seed-vessels ; but from these I expect young 

 old men in abundance, and you had better register the birth of 

 the first one, which came into existence this week as naked as 



