300 OBSERVATIONS ON THE NATURAL FAMILY 



The third species, Galea pinifolia, is adopted from 

 Porster's Plorulse Tnsularum Australium Prodromus. 



The specimen of this plant in George Forster's Herba- 

 rium (now forming part of the extensive collection of Mr. 

 Lambert) is very imperfect ; it evidently, however, belongs 

 to the same species with a more complete specimen 

 received, without a name, from Porster by Sir Joseph 

 Banks, in whose Herbarium I have examined it, and ascer- 

 tained that it has a naked receptacle. It therefore cannot 

 be a species of Galea, which I have no doubt Forster con- 

 sidered it merely from a certain degree of resemblance to 

 his Galea leptopliylla. From the structure of its stigmata, 

 antherae, and involucrum. Galea pinifolia belongs, indeed, 

 to a very different tribe, and might even be referred to 

 Gnaphalium as it at present stands. But this extensive 

 and ill-defined genus evidently requires reformation ; and 

 123] if the necessity for its subdivision be admitted, it will 

 also, I believe, be found most expedient to apply the name 

 Gnaphalium to that section to which G. luteo-album, syl- 

 vaticum, and uliginosum belong, and which is characterised 

 by its naked receptacle, its involucrum connivent at top 

 and of equal height with the truncated capitulum, which 

 consists of numerous filiform female florets in the circum- 

 ference, with a smaller number of hermaphrodite florets 

 in the disk, both of them ripening seeds and having a 

 sessile capillary deciduous pappus. 



To Gnaphalium so limited Galea pinifolia, a shrub with 

 nearly acerose leaves, and in which all or most of the flos- 

 culi are hermaphrodite and the radii of the persistent 

 pappus somewhat thickened upwards, cannot be referred. 



It seems, however, to approach more nearly to Anten- 

 naria, a genus separated from Gnaphalium by Gsertner, 

 but which, as he has proposed it, consists of three tribes of 



inXimis involucri subsimiles, et una cum iisdem deciduce. CorolIulEe glabra. 

 antherarum integerrimcE. Pappus albus, radiis simplici serie. 



Obs. I have not seen perfect seeds; and as even in the unripe v 

 fall off along with the inner squamae of the involucrum, and the anther* ,-. 

 ject in a remarkable degree, it is possible the plant here described may be only 

 the male of a dioecious species ; it certainly, however, belongs to a genus not 

 before published. 



