BUB I AC EM. 



267 



' Anthoapermum athiopieum. 



Fig. 237. Male flower (f). 



■wHch the gyneecium is well developed, the receptacle is sacciform, 

 most frequently obovoid, the cavity lodging the bilocular ovary, sur- 

 mounted by an epigynous disk of little thickness with two very long 

 slender branches, and a style everywhere bristling with papillae. In 

 the male flower the receptacle becomes very small ; the ovary dis- 

 appears, and the stylary branches alone, 

 sometimes much reduced in size, may 

 irepresent the gynsecium, Th© calyx in- 

 serted at the mouth of the receptacle is 

 often very short, nearly entire or with 

 persistent teeth of variable size. One or 

 two of ±hem may even become foliaceous. 

 The corolla varies in form in the flowers 

 of the two sexes. In the males it is well 

 developed, bell- or funnel-shaped, glabrous 

 or hairy at ,the throat, with 3-5 vaivate 

 lobes. In the females it^generally becomes 

 small, narrow, tubular with 2-5 erect 



teeth or lobes, often applied to the styles. The stamens, wanting or 

 remaining rudimentary in the female flowers, number 3-5 in the 

 males, inserted on the tube of the corolla, formed of a very slender 

 and mobile filament, often incurved by the weight of the elongate, 

 exserted, introrse, bilocular, dorsifixed anther dehiscing by two longi- 

 tudinal clefts. In each ovarian cell, quite at the base of the internal 

 a,ngle, is inserted an ascending, anatropous ovule, with micropyle 

 exterior and inferior. The fruit, didymous, compressed perpendicular 

 to the partition, separates into two cocci, indehiscent or dehiscing 

 along the face, and enclosing each a seed with thin coat, covering a 

 fleshy or hard albumen, the axis of which is occupied by an elongate 

 embryo, with foliaceous cotyledons and inferior cylindrical radicle. 

 The Anthpsperms, of which more than a score of species * have been 

 described, natives of southern, eastern and western tropical Africa and 

 Madagascar, are shrubs of small figure, erect or drooping, glabrous 

 or hairy, with opposite or verticillate, ordinarily ericoid leaves, united 

 by a membranous interpetiolar sheath, more or less mingled with- 

 ies the summit of which is often cut to one or more points. 



'.Cruse, Sub. Cap. 7, t. 1, fig. 1, 2.— Spbeno. 

 )/st. Yeg. i. 399. — Hakv. and Sond. Fl- Cap. 



iii. 26.— HiERN, Fl. Trap. Afr. iii. 229.^"Waip. 

 Ann. ii. 741. 



