SUPPLEMENTAL OBSERVATIONS. 
405 
an error in referring this African plant to the little 1-flowered 
(rarely 2-flowered) N. serotinus of Clusius, which grows in 
Spain, Naples, and Sardinia ; and that not even as a variety, 
but as identical. The latter plant is very small, with slender 
leaves, and is said to produce its scape often before their ap- 
pearance. It is generally one-flowered, though I have seen 
a two-flowered Sardinian specimen ; but there is no record 
of its bearing a greater number of flowers. I have never 
seen a fresh specimen, but in the dry specimens the cup is 
not 1-1 6th of an inch long and about ^th wide, and it is 
expressly described by Linnaeus as 6-cleft, nectario brevissimo 
sexpartito. The Maltese plant has the cup full ^ long, and 
a wide, with only three indentures opposite the sepaline 
midribs ; and as the length of the tube and limb is not very 
different in the two plants, the proportion of the cup to them is 
very dissimilar. I cannot ascertain the length of the style 
in serotina ; in asquilimba it just exceeds the tube. The 
leaves of sequilimba rise before the flower, from 3 to 4 in 
number, glaucous, keeled, above ^ an inch wide, about as 
tall as the scape at the time of flowering. Clusius represents 
the solitary flower of serotina erect, and it is nearly so in most 
of the specimens I have seen. Those of eequilimba are hori- 
zontal, with a stellate limb, which is remarkable from the 
nearly equal width of the petals and sepals. The sepals of 
serotina are very decidedly wider than the petals, and its 
leaves but the 16th of an inch wide. In all others that I 
have seen the sepals are widest. — Scape glaucous, lined, a 
little tortuous; germen horizontal; tube green, -|ths long; 
horizontal ; limb whitish, with a green line on the back of each 
segment, stellate ; cup ^th long, 3 wide, a little ventricose, 
more or less three-lobed ; style exceeding the tube, shorter than 
the sepaline filaments; expansion of the limb 1 inch and 
l-16th. The leaves are enclosed at the base by three cylindri- 
cal sheaths, white, lined with green, of which the outer is 
about ^ths of an inch diameter, the inner about an inch long 
above ground. This plant flowers in Malta at the end of Oc- 
tober, yet is not truly an autumnal flower, but one of the 
earliest species in a situation and climate where there is no 
winter. One of the bulbs taken up in September, and 
placed in the stove at Spoft’orth the first week of November, 
opened its first flower on the 19th of December, the others in 
the same pot rather later. The strongest bulb, left in a green- 
house with a warm flue and free access of air, will not flower 
before January ; and it is clear that, if the roots had been set 
