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XXXVII. On Cuscuta epilinurn and halophyta. By Charles C. Babington, 



Esq., M.A., F.L.S., F.G.S., Sfc. 



Read November 5th, 1839. 



In a paper which the Society has done me the honour to publish in the 

 second part of the present volume of its Transactions, I have added my testi- 

 mony to the existence of scales in the tube of the corolla of C. europcea, as first 

 stated by Mr. Brown, and endeavoured to explain by their extreme difficulty of 

 detection, even in living specimens, the fact of their not having been observed by 

 several botanists of eminence. Since the publication of that paper I have ob- 

 tained specimens of two other species, in both of which I have found these little 

 organs, and will, with the permission of the Society, proceed to lay before it an 

 account of the appearances presented upon an internal view of their corollas. 



In the first of these plants, C. epilinurn, Weihe, we find a ventricose tube 

 furnished with a whorl of adpressed bifid scales, each branch of which is 

 usually divided in a rather irregular manner into two or three fingerlike 

 points, as I have endeavoured roughly to represent in fig. 1. ; the divisions of 

 the corolla terminate in acute points, and the stamens have very short fila- 

 ments and are inserted much higher up than the extremity of the scales. 



In Reichenbach's figure of this plant in his Icones Plant, tab. 693, the scales 

 are very incorrectly given, each of them being there represented as two 

 minute, separate, roundish bodies, pointing downwards. Specimens received 

 from him (No. 19 of his Fl. Germ, exsic), gathered near Borna, in the neigh- 

 bourhood of Chemnitz, by M. Weicker, have however these parts of exactly 

 the form described above, and agree in all points with the English plant, with 

 the exception of the want of a bractea under each bunch of flowers. It is 

 however possible, from the manner in which this bractea is hidden by the 

 flowers in the English plant, that it may also exist in that found in Germany, 

 although the employment of its absence as a part of the specific character is 

 strongly opposed to this supposition. I am indebted to my friend Mr. J. E. 



VOL. XVIII. 4 E 



