867 



ILLUSTRATIONS OF POLYCOTYLEDONY IN THE 

 GENUS PERSOONIA, WITH SOME REFERENCE 

 TO JVUYTSIA. 



[N.OO. Proteacece; Loranthacece\. 



By J. J. Fletcher. 



(Plates xxxiv.-xxxv.) 



About a century ago Sir Joseph Banks gave to the younger 

 Gartner some botanical specimens, including portion of an Aus- 

 tralian plant whose seeds contained embryos with five cotyledons. 

 For this plant Gartner fil., proposed the name Pentadactylon 

 at igusti folium, g. et sp. nov. [ = Persoonia linearis Andr.]; and he 

 included a description of it, with figures, in the Supplement to 

 his father's great work " De Fructibus et Seminibus " published 

 in 1807.* This is the first recorded instance of a polycotylous 

 Protead. But seventy-five years later, Baron von Mueller was 

 able to announce that the peculiarity recognised by C. Gartner in 

 Persoonia linearis was shared, in a varying degree, by the embryos 

 of a substantial majority of the species of Persoonia whose fruits 

 were available for examination. This genus, in fact, is without 

 a rival among the Angiosperms for the number of species which 

 habitually produce polycotylous embryos (in the current sense of 

 the term); and in this respect it promises to compare not alto- 

 gether unfavourably with some of the genera of the Coniferae 



* From the synonymy given on p. 159 of his paper, it appears that Robert 

 Brown had recognised that C. Gartner's generic name Pentadactylon was 

 synonymous with the earlier described Persoonia of Smith; but it was left 

 to Mr. Bentham to settle definitely, from the comparison of specimens, that 

 Pentadactylon angustifolium C. Gartn., was synonymous with the earlier 

 name, Persoonia linearis of Andrews. 



