136 GOEDONIA, 



China coast the diagnosis as quoted is so very meagre, that it 

 might easily apply to another plant of the same order such as occurs 

 in Penang. 



There is among the dried plants distributed by Wallich in 1832. 

 a specimen labelled Camellia axillaris which is not the Camellia 

 axillaris of ( ? Brown ex) Sims and Ker; and as the diagnosis does 

 not fit it, it is probably some substitute. But it is said that the 

 handwriting is Roxburgh's, and therein must be indubitable proof 

 that Roxburgh used the name for some unrecognised species. 



Tins Asiatic Gordonia persists in cultivation. 



Probably from 1819 forward this Chinese plant so introduced 

 by Whitley, Brames and Milne, was not lost to European gardens : 

 it finds mention in several publications of the immediately follow- 

 ing years, the chief of which was Eobert Sweet's Hortus Britanni- 

 cus, 1826, wherein the genus Polys pora was put forward for it and 

 it became Polyspora axillaris. In 1842 it was at Kew, having been 

 received from Liege, and flowered, furnishing plate 4019 of the 

 Botanical Magazine, under which Sir William Hooker confidently 

 stated it to be Chinese because he had got dried specimens from 

 China. Quite recently (Gardener's Chronicle, lxi, p. 250, June 

 23rd, 1917) it has been figured again from Kew. 



There are certain differences between Hooker's plate and the 

 two which went before it, which may be touched upon next. 



It appears to exhibit gynodioecism but this 

 was not suspected. 



It had not escaped the wonderful acumen of Robert Brown 

 that there was something sexually imperfect in the flower of the 

 plant which he saw in 1818: it appeared female; but the flowers of 

 the plant which flowered in Kew in 1842 were apparently fully 

 hermaphrodite. This evidence of the occurrence of gyno-dioecism 

 in the species is now supported by the discovery of similar sexual 

 variations in allied plants. But apparently Choisy who monograph- 

 ed the order in 1855 did not appreciate it, so that (Memoires de la 

 Societe physique de Geneve, xiv, p. 141) he thought it necessary to 

 make two species, — G. axillaris and G. Lessertii, of the two, and in 

 doing this he appears also to have made some further confusion. 



GORDONIA RECOGNISED AS AN ASIATIC GENUS; THE SEQUENCE 

 IN WHICH SPECIES WERE DETECTED. 



Returning to the year 1826 when Sweet tried to establish the 

 genus Polyspora for Camellia axillaris, not putting it into Gordonia 

 perhaps because there were in Gordonia the misplaced plants named 

 on p. 134, we come to the announcement by the Dutch botanist 

 Blume of the occurrence of Gordonia excelsa in Java, being the first 



Jour. Straits Branch 



