PLANTiE JAVANIC^ RARIOKES. 615 



fruit to that of S.fcetida, both being figured in the volume 

 of drawings ah'eady referred to. These were the only 

 materials he appears ever to have examined, and his own 

 herbarium contained absolutely nothing except a single leaf 

 of S. fcetida : the generic character consequently remains 

 unchanged in all his subsequent works. 



In 'Elora Zeylanica,' Linnaeus correctly includes 

 Sterculia in his Class Monoecia, notices the imperfect 

 stamina in the female flower, and only overlooks the minute 

 rudiments of ovaria in the male flower. He referred the 

 genus to his Natural Order ^n'cocc<® (very nearly correspond- 

 ing with the EwphorbiacecB of Jussieu), as appears first in 

 'Philosophia Botanica/ published in 1751, and afterwards 

 in the sixth edition of his ' Genera Plantarum' in 1764. 

 In this determination of its affinity he was followed by 

 Bernard de Jussieu in 1759, by Adanson in 1763 ; and in 

 a manuscript list of the arrangement of plants adopted in 

 1779 in the Paris Garden, I find Sterculia still placed in 

 the same family. The generic character of Sterculia, as 

 given by Linnaeus, who does not notice, and had no oppor- 

 tunity of ascertaining the structure of the seed, might with 

 very slight alteration stand for that of the whole tribe, 

 Heritiera alone excepted. 



In the order of time, the next work in which the same 

 genus is described, though under a different name, is 

 Aublet's ' History of the Plants of French Guiana,'^ which 

 appeared in 1775. He describes his genus Ivira, which all 

 subsequent botanists have referred to Sterculia, as having 

 hermaphrodite flowers, with ten stamina, and the capsules 

 or foUicles surrounded at the base with rigid filiform pro- 

 cesses, formed as he states by the enlargement of the hairs 

 which according to him exist in the flowering state. But 

 from an examination of the specimens in his own herba- 

 rium (purchased by Sir Joseph Banks and now in the 

 British Museum), as well as from others collected in the 

 same country by the late celebrated Professor Richard, it 

 appears that the flowers are unisexual ; that the hairs of the 



1 p. 695, t. 279. 



