NAT. ORDKR. — MYRTACEJa. 
117 
placed cross-ways, and at nearly right or wide angles with the 
branch ; very rarely more than once compound ; the pedicles divari- 
cate, stout, round, smooth and shining, and pointed at the top ; Jioic- 
er-buds inversely pear-shaped, hard, firm, purplish-red below, the 
imbricate sepals green ; sepals four, patent concave, transversely 
oval, permanent as a crown to the fruit, and then erect and conni- 
vent ; petals greenish or white, much larger than the sepals, round, 
very concave, patent, deciduous, with very numerous stamens, which 
are curiously subspirally involute, as if in four sets, in the buds ; Jil- 
aments long, the outer ones an inch and a half, white, with a very 
pale primrose or greenish yellow tinge, becoming deeper by age ; the 
innermost gradually shorter, seated on a raised, prominent, suboc- 
tagonal ring at the base of the sepals ; anthers very small, oblong, 
and of a yellowish white ; style longer than the stamens, white sub- 
ulate, simple, persistent. A naked, hollow, cup-shaped square, or 
four-sided space surrounds its base, within the raised staminiferous 
ring ; but I have never seen the filaments exposing this (as figured 
by some botanists,) unless when part of them had fallen off. On the 
contrary, they quite conceal the whole centre of the flower, incurv- 
ing rather, and becoming denser towards the style. They retain 
something of a spiral tendency, acquired in the bud, for sometime 
after full expansion. Ouar?/ uniformly two celled, containing numer- 
ous angular, narrow-oblong, ovules, attached by one end to a pla- 
centa, prominent into each cell from the central axis or dissepiment , 
fruit a subglobose, one-celled, rather dry, smooth, drape-like berry, 
approaching always more or less to pear-shaped, about an inch in 
diameter, crowned by the persistent calyx, and umbilicate at the 
top, of a delicate pale ochre-yellow, suffused more or less on one side 
with rose color, and with a very powerful smell and taste of rose- 
water ; the flesh about two lines thick, sweet, but somewhat dry and 
mealy, or rather grumose ; a large cavity inside of one cell, with 
merely traces of the obliterated dissepiment, containing from one to 
three large brown seeds, these are loose and rattle within the cavity. 
