A REVISION OF PHILIPPINE LORAN1 HACE/E. 
By E. D. Merrill. 
( From the Botanical Section of the Biological Laboratory, Bureau of Science, 
Manila, P. I.) 
The greatest difficulty in dealing with this family is in connection 
with the generic limits of Loranthus, to determine whether or not to 
follow Bentham and refer all the forms to one great genus with numerous 
sections, or to follow Van Tieghem, recognizing a great number of small, 
more or less closely allied genera, or to follow Engler, who chooses a 
middle course, recognizing a few genera, several of them large and with 
numerous subgenera. After considerable preliminary work on the group, 
I decided to follow Bentham, excluding, however, the species with versa- 
tile anthers, of which we have a single representative in the Philippines, 
as his arrangement on the whole seemed to me to be the most logical and 
simple one. The difficulty with Van Tieghem’s system is that his work 
is not sufficiently amplified, his generic and specific descriptions being too 
short, and frequently almost wanting, so that it is quite difficult, if not 
impossible, to follow him closely, unless one has access to the specimens 
cited by him. After a careful study of the material available here, I am 
now rather firmly convinced that there is no middle ground to be taken 
in the matter, and that one must refer most of the species to a single, 
or at most two or three large and small genera, or one must follow Yan 
Tieghem, and recognize numerous small and more or less closely allied 
genera, only in the latter case it will be necessary to establish a consider- 
able number of new genera to accommodate numerous Philippine and 
Malayan species that can not be fitted into any of those proposed by him. 
It is fortunate that there is in the herbarium of this Bureau a nearly 
complete set of Cuming’s Philippine Loranthacece, so that it lias been 
possible for me accurately to identify most of the species established by 
Yan Tieghem based on this collection; without these specimens it is 
quite impossible to identify the species on account of the short descrip- 
tions. The other material cited is entirely of recent collection. 
Six genera have been recognized, of which the largest is Lorantlius , 
with forty-three species, although specimens not in proper condition for 
complete descriptions, at present in our herbarium, would bring this list 
up to about fifty. When material available has not allowed me to place 
the species in its proper section, I have refrained from describing such 
plants, and a' number of these, at present represented by incomplete 
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