THE HEEBAmUM AMBOINENSE. S6B 
SO common about the villages of India, although there are 
ten iSlaments, five only of them have antherse, as described 
by Rheede, " colus in decern staminula e viridi albula ex- 
trorsUm flexa, divisus, quorum paria {singula intellige) una 
grandiusculo flavescente obteguntur apice and it is pos- 
sible that Burman may have thought that some of the an- 
therae had fallen by accident from his specimen, and that 
in their natural state all the filaments were fertile, I have, 
however, seen two kinds of this tree, one growing near vil- 
lages, and the other in woods, and answering to the Wattu 
(hortensis) Murungu, and Katu (sylvestris) Murungha of 
the Ceylonese; and, as I have not seen the flowers of the 
kind growing spontaneously in woods, it may have only 
five filaments, as Burman describes. I shall, however, again 
return to this distinction. 
Linnaeus, in the Flora Zeylonica (155), not only adopted 
the error Plukenet, in considering the Moringa as the 
same with the Lignum nephriticum ; but still farther, he 
considered it, not only as belonging to the same genus with 
the Balanus myrepska or Nux hehen^ but as being the 
same plant, an error from which Plukenet escaped. How 
Linnaeus came to place the Moringa in the same genus with 
the Bonduc of preceding authors, I cannot say ; as, in my 
opinion, notwithstanding his eminent authority joined to 
that of Jussieu, I must agree with Gaertner in thinking 
that it cannot belong even to the same natural order (Le- 
guminosse), but seems to approach nearer to the Rutace^; 
although even this arrangement is not satisfactory, and it 
seems to belong to a genus rejecting a close affinity with ali 
others. 
The error of Linnaeus, in joining the Moringa with the 
Bonducs, to form the new genus Guilandina, having be- 
come evident, Jussieu and other French botanists have 
most properly restored the name Moringa given by J ohn 
VOL. V. 
