2 NEW OR RARE MALAYAN PLANTS. 



Dillenia, and has by no means made this group of plants 

 easier to understand. The real difficulties of separating the 

 two genera lies only in the difficulty of working from badly 

 preserved herbarium specimens. The plants undoubtedly do 

 not, unless very carefully preserved, dry well, but in life there 

 is little difficulty in distinguishing the two genera. The 

 great characteristic lies in the fruit. In Wormia after the 

 petals have fallen, the sepals close over the pistil and when 

 the fruit is ripe the carpels expand, becoming of a beautiful 

 rose pink or white. They split along the edge and display 

 the small black seeds clad in a scarlet aril. These pink stars 

 of carpels, two inches or more across in the common species 

 W. subsessilis are nearly as attractive as flowers. 



In Dillenia the sepals once closed over the pistil do not 

 expand any more. They become fleshy and sweet or acid, 

 the carpels enclosed inside do not open, and as they do not 

 ever dehisce, the seeds do not possess a coloured aril, which 

 would be useless in seed dispersal. 



Wormia seed is dispersed by birds which attracted by 

 the brightly coloured aril swallow the seeds. The carpels 

 split in the very early morning, and though I have constantly 

 looked for seed at say 8 or 9 o'clock, it is usually already gone, 

 so early do the birds find it. The chief disperser of W. 

 subsessilis in Singapore is the common bulbul Pycnonotus 

 anal is who is very keen on the scarlet arils. 



Dillenia on the other hand is dispersed by Mammals, or 

 the rolling away of the fruit or its floating away on the river, 

 on the banks of which some species grow. The fruit is green 

 or_yellow pulpy and sweet. As it never opens arils are useless, 

 so it possesses none. This character however is not always 

 easy to make out in dried specimens as is evinced by Sir 

 George Xing's having transferred Dillenia meliosmoefolia 

 correctly referred by Hooker to Dillenia to the genus Wormia. 



The Wormias have been separated into sections accord- 

 ing to whether the stamens are all equally long or the inner 

 row is longer than the outer one. This is a good distinction 

 but there is a very good separating point in the petiole. In 

 a certain set, all shrubby and inhabiting swamps, the petioles 



Jour. Straits Branch 



