GOEDONIA. 145 



flowers perish in the horizontal position of flowering : . fertile cap- 

 sules however resume a more or less upright position and the 

 mature capsule dehisces on the tree facing more or less upwards. 

 It is hygroscopic, closing slowly if wetted and opening slowly again 

 when dried. The walls of the loculi fit over the seeds very closely 

 so that these escape with difficulty, and it is quite common for the 

 capsule to fall to the bottom of the forest with them still enclosed. 



The Seed and Seedling. 



The germination of 67. singaporiana has been watched. In it 

 the seed coats are split along the longer free margin of the seed 

 and the radicle is extruded. When this has anchored the coty- 

 ledons are raised up and with them the seed coats, from which they 

 escape in consequence of their efforts to attain a more or less 

 horizontal position. 



The cotyledons are somewhat arched, and are without the 

 mucilage-glands of the later foliage. With our present scant know- 



Fig. 3. Seedling of G. singaporiana with the cotyledons freeing 

 themselves from the seed coats. To the left are the cotyledons seen from above. 



ledge of the species of Gordonia the characters of the foliage help 

 us more than anything else to a scheme of classification, probably 

 in no way because they are the best, but because we know too little 

 about the capsules. As regards the latter not only do we suffer 

 from the circumstance that from many of the species they have 

 not been collected yet, but also from the fact that the differences in 

 them are difficult to bring out in descriptions unaccompanied by 

 drawings. Towards a remedy the following line blocks may do a 

 little. The next proceeding towards understanding the genus, 

 apart from the collecting of more material, is a re-examination of 

 the Sumatran and Bornean types in Dutch herbaria. 



R. A. Soc, No. 76, 1917. 



