486 NATURAL HISTORY OF PLANTS. 
five stamens' alternating with these latter leaves, each consisting of 
a thick incurved filament and an introrse two-celled basifixed anther 
of longitudinal dehiscence. Alternating with these stamens are five 
pairs of thick glands, the glands of each pair approximated’ to form a 
crescent with its concavity outwards ; they sur- 
round a little depression which lodges a short 
abortive gyneeceum. In the female flowers the 
perianth is nearly the same as in the males, 
except that the number of its leaves is more 
variable. The stamens and the glands accom- 
panying them are arranged as in the male 
flower, but the former are sterile, having no 
anther, or only a rudiment at the top of the 
filament. The gynzceum here consists of a 
free ovary, covered with peltate scales and sur- 
mounted by a narrow style, at first inflexed, and divided above into 
two little stigmatiferous lobes. In the ovary-cell is seen a parietal 
placenta, bearing nearly at its top two collateral descending ana- 
tropous ovules,’ whose micropyles, capped by their obturators,* turn 
up under the hilum towards the placenta (fig. 297). The fruit isa 
naked drupe, but its mesocarp is not thick. The seed-coats enclose 
a fleshy albumen and an embryo with foliaceous cotyledons and a 
cylindrical superior radicle. Only one species of this genus is 
known,’ a Chilian tree, with alternate opposite or subverticillate 
leaves, simple entire petiolate and exstipulate, and covered like most 
of the organs with scurfy peltate hairs, The flowers form racemes, 
simple or more rarely ramified, and solitary or few together in the 
axils of the leaves. 
Aextoxicon punctatum. 
Fre. 297. 
Gynzeceum opened (3°). 
Apanson in 1763 established the family Elzagni ;* he placed it 
next to Aristolochiacee, and made it comprise not only Ha«agnus 
and Hippophae, but several Santalacee, Tupelo (Nyssa), Cynomorium, 
16 or 7 (DECNE.). 
2 There are probably ten glands at first, one 
on either side of each staminal filament ; but 
usually the two adjacent ones, touching in the 
interspace between two stamens, stick or unite 
together to a variable extent. They are often 
smaller and more distinct in the female flowers. 
8 With two coats. 
4 DecaisneE has contested the existence of this 
organ, It is applied to the top of the micro- 
pyle, and receives into a superficial groove on 
each side near its lower edge an acute bowed 
rather long prolongation of the nucleus (or 
perhaps of the embryo-sac), which gives the idea 
that the obturator plays an important part in 
fecundation. 
5 Zh. punctatum R. & Pav., loc. eit.—C. Gay, 
Fl. Chil., v. 348. 
6 Fam. des Pl., ii. 77, Fam, xii, 
