278 THE NATURALIST IN AUSTRALIA. 
subject for the top illustration in Plate XLIX. The species is apparently identical 
with the Northern Fruit-eating Bat, Pteropus conspicillatus. 
What would at first sight appear to be a floral product closely resembling a 
rose or camelia in size, shape, and structure, is depicted in the accompanying 
illustration. It is as a matter of fact no flower at all, but a vagary of vegetation 
induced through the interference of a gall-insect, the plant thus distinguished being 
the ordinary White Mangrove, Avicennia officinalis. Several of the bushes in the 
vicinity of the one from which the examples figured were taken, were literally laden 
with these rosette-shaped galls, one small spray gathered (which was also 
photographed) bearing as many as twenty of these singular products. The colour of 
these “gall flowers” approximated to that of the leaves of the tree that bore them. 
From an esthetic point of view, they were undoubtedly as worthy of admiration as 
the green roses which are assiduously cultivated and held in high repute in the gardens 
of rose specialists. Contemplating these Mangrove “roses” in conjunction with the 
verdant variety of Rosa hortensis that happens to be flourishing in the writer’s garden 
and thus available for comparison while penning these lines, the mind is exercised 
with the thought as to whether gall-insects have not had something to do with the 
origin of some of our most 
highly prized horticultural 
triumphs. If, in fact, the 
green rose is the archetype 
of the exquisite blooms 
that through high cultiva- 
tion and under another 
colour smell so sweet, have 
we not in this mangrove 
gall created straightaway 
the prototype of a floral 
gem that simply needs 
7 tae nt, Photo, . Orie 
Ee “bleaching and the addition 
of a drop of scent to produce a buttonhole camelia 
that would satisfy the most fastidious. 
There is yet another noteworthy point con- 
cerning this Mangrove vagary. That “big fleas 
have lesser fleas, &c.” is a time-worn truism 
ROSETTE GALLS OF WHITE MANGROVE. 
