THE SC1TAMINE/E OF THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS. 
By H. N. Ridley. 
(Director, Botanic Garden, Singapore, Straits Settlements.) 
This account of the Scitaminece of the Philippine Islands is based on 
the whole series of specimens in the herbarium of the Bureau of Science, 
Manila, kindly placed in my hands by Mr. Elmer D. Merrill, which 
contains a very fine series of specimens of this group collected by many 
botanists in different islands of the Archipelago, and also collections 
made by Mr. A. D. E. Elmer. 
Among the earlier collectors in the Philippines were Haenke, Cuming, 
and Blanco. The first of these collected a good number of species which 
were described and figured by Presl in “Relicpiiae Haenkeanae.” The 
types of Presl’s species I have not seen ; nearly all have been re-collected, 
but one or two do not seem to have been met with again. Cuming seems 
to have obtained comparatively few species of the order. Blanco described 
a small number, chiefly cultivated species, in the first and second edition 
of his “Flora de Pilipinas,” some of which are figured by Naves in the 
third edition. Warburg also made extensive collections in the Archi- 
pelago, and several of the species described by Iv. Schumann in the 
“Pflanzenreich,” based on material collected by the former, I have not 
been able to identify with any of the plants collected by th'e American 
botanists, and to complete this account I have had to copy Schumann’s 
descriptions. 
The area does not seem to be so rich in this group of plants as are the 
Malay Islands farther west, or the Malay Peninsula. The number of 
genera, twenty-one, is not quite so large and the number of species is 
much smaller than in the Malay Peninsula. Of the indigenous genera 
we have Globba, Hedychium, Gastrochilus, Zingiber, Hornstedtia, Amo- 
mum, Plagiostachys, Alpinia, and Costus in Z ingib eracece, and Phrynium, 
Phacelophrynium, and Donax in Maraniacece, with the endemic genera 
Kolowratia, Leptosolena and Adelmeria (Z in gib eracece) , and Mono- 
plirynium (Marantacece) . Of the genera found in the Malay Peninsula 
and Archipelago, not yet met with in the Philippines, are Odontychium, 
Camptandra, Haplochorema, Conamomum, EJettariopsis, Geostachys, 
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