OLACACEiE. 303 



1. Rhytidandra Vitiensis, Sp. Nov. (Tab. 28.) 



Hab. Feejee Islands. (The particular habitat is not recorded.) 



Only a single specimen, with unexpanded flowers, occurs in the 

 collection. The plant appears to be a shrub, with slender and sar- 

 mentose branches, glabrous, or the young parts more or less cinereous- 

 puberulent. Leaves alternate, petioled, ovate, oblique, unequal at the 

 base, acuminate, entire, or obscurely repand, 3 or 4 inches long and 

 one and a half to 2 inches wide, membranaceous, sparingly feather- 

 veined ; the veins connected by transverse veinlets. Stipules none. 

 Peduncles axillary, longer than the petioles (half an inch or more in 

 length), bearing a feiv- (7-1 2-) flowered small cyme. Pedicels short, 

 minutely unibracteolate at the apex, where they are articulated with 

 the flower. Unexpanded flowers 3 lines long, minutely silky-canes- 

 cent, hermaphrodite. Calyx small, about a line or a line and a half 

 long, including its turbinate tube, which coheres with the ovary through- 

 out ; the free summit or limb cup-shaped, half a line long, truncate, the 

 border obscurely 6-7 '-toothed. Petals 6 or 7, inserted at the junction of 

 the free part of the calyx with the summit of the ovary, without the 

 intervention of any manifest perigynous disk, linear, valvate in aesti- 

 vation, apparently distinct in anthesis, and deciduous, of a thickish 

 texture, glabrous, and destitute of any appendage inside. Stamow as 

 many as the petals and alternate with them, inserted with them,, and 

 equalling them in length, not cohering with their bases. Filaments 

 extremely short, bearded inside, continued into a smooth and unappen- 

 daged connective ; to which the four cells of the long and linear anther 

 are introrsely adnate. These slender cells, or locelli, are transversely 

 constricted at short and irregular intervals (nearly as in most species 

 of Gomphia), so as to appear more or less necklace-shaped or cham- 

 bered : their dehiscence is not obvious. Style elongated (about the 

 length of the petals), central, glabrous, somewhat angled or grooved, 

 two-cleft above the middle ; the divisions filiform and somewhat flat- 

 tened, 2-3-toothed or cleft at the apex ; the stigmas terminal, small, 

 and simple. Ovary turbinate, one-celled, with no vestiges of other 

 cells or of incomplete partitions, not eccentric, fleshy, wholly invested 

 by the adnate calyx-tube, except the truncate summit, which is covered 



