138 Transactions of the Royal Society of Victoria. 



Pluchea conocephala. 



Euryhia conocephala, F. v. M. in the Transactions of the 



Victorian Institute, L, 36. 



Dwarf-shrubby, much branched ; leaves small, obovate 

 or spatular-cuneate, flat, entire, as well as the branchlets 

 grey velvety ; flower-headlets sessile, singly terminating 

 branchlets imperfectly dioecious ; involucre at first almost 

 hemiellipsoid-cylindrical, at last obverse conical ; involucral 

 bracts in several rows, rounded-blunt, near the upper end 

 somewhat velvet-downy and fringy-ciliate, the outer bracts 

 abbreviated, the lowest verging to an oval form, the inner 

 bracts gradually elongated, narrowly elliptical-cuneate, and 

 finally beyond the middle recurved ; receptacle minute ; 

 flowers few within each involucre and extending considerably 

 beyond it ; corolla of the perfect staminate flowers slightly 

 dilated above the middle, those of the most developed 

 pistillate flowers thinly cylindrical, the flve lobes of either 

 rather long, comparatively narrow, hardly spreading ; style 

 glabrous ; achenes narrow-cylindrical, scarcely angular, quite 

 glabrous ; bristlets of the pappus numerous, almost biseriate, 

 nearly equal in length, almost plumously ciliate. In arid 

 calcareous tracts of country from the Wimmera, Darling, and 

 Murray Kivers, extending westward as far as Eucla, the 

 northern limits of the species remaining hitherto unascer- 

 tained. 



When the writer of these observations discovered already 

 in 1848 this remarkable plant, he placed it in the Cassinian 

 genus Eurybia (since reduced to Olearia and later still to 

 Aster), on account of great external resemblance to Aster 

 pimeloides, though at the time some abnormal characteristics, 

 such as the absence of ligulate corollas, were recognised and 

 subsequently recorded. The plant is now transferred to 

 the mainly tropical genus Pluchea, of which it is the most 

 southern species, although Pluchea Eyrea was traced, in 

 1851, also so far south as the apex of Spencer's Gulf For 

 including this plant in Pluchea it is however needful to 

 extend somewhat the limits of that genus, in as much as 

 each individual plant seems to produce within its involucres 

 one only of the two states of flowers, as only few flowers 

 occur in each involucre, as the flowers with imperfect anthers 

 produce also a tive-lobed corolla, as the bristlets of the 

 pappus are very copious, therefore not uniseriate, and 



