62 Descriptive Notes on Papuan Plants. 
PASSIFLOREJE. 
Modecca australis. 
R. Brown in De Candolle, prodr. iii. 337. 
Fly-River ; Sir Will. Macgregor. 
To this species seems referable M. populifolia, Zippel in Blume’s 
Rumphia i., 168 t. 50, from Timor, published 1835, therefore seven 
years after the description of R. Brown’s Carpentaria-plant had 
appeared, both localities being not distant from New Guinea. The 
fruits are delineated by Bauer as almost pear-shaped and the seeds 
as only half enclosed in the aril ; but this is evidently explained by 
the immaturity of the fruit, available to that distinguished artist. The 
covering of the seeds described and by fig. 4 illustrated in Blume’s 
work is given as short, but the main picture shows the fully developed 
seeds quite enveloped in the aril, as indeed they are on specimens 
from the Fly-River, and as likewise noted and illustrated by Blume 
for M. obtusa and M. cordifolia. The coils of the tendrils in 
Australian specimens are varying from one to seven. The male 
flowers are pictured also in a young state only, which might account 
for the extreme shortness of the filaments, and further they are 
shown as tetramerous ; whether this is a really permanent and 
peculiar characteristic, further research must prove ; in all other 
species the flowers are recorded as pentamerous ; so they are found 
also on this occasion, but in the few, available for dissection here, 
one had of its five anthers only three well developed ; nevertheless 
the normal occurrence of tetramerous flowers in Passiflora tetrandra 
speaks for the likelihood of the same characteristic occurring within 
the genus Modecca likewise. M. austi-alis occurs on the following 
places as yet unrecorded for it : — King’s Sound, Chapman ; Collier- 
Bay, Hughan ; Melville-Bay and Liverpool-River, Gulliver ; entrance 
of the Victoria-River, F. v. M. ; Mackay- and Herbert-River, 
Dallachy; Bloomfield-River, Miss Bauer; Endeavour-River, Persieh. 
This plant climbs sometimes to the njipor branches of tall trees. 
The fruit attains a length of four inches ; the pericarp is occasion- 
ally two- or four-valved. Seeds very numerous, when mature 
measuring a inch ; the aril, though succulent, is thin and as a 
whole detractable ; the outer layer or the testa is pale, the inner or 
endopleura is dark, hard, comparatively thick and intruding undularly 
somewhat into the albnment. 
