“ The genus Eleutherine was founded in MS. notes for an 
arrangement of the confused mass of plants heaped together 
under the name Sisyrinchium, which cannot be well com- 
pleted, from the difficulty of investigating the minute structure 
of such fugacious flowers in dry specimens, and the equal 
difficulty of obtaining and cultivating several of them. The 
type of the genus Eleutherine is the plant figured in the Bot. 
Mag. under the name Marica plicata, and named in Sweet’s 
Hort. Brit. Sisyrinchium latifolium. It has very little affinity 
indeed to Marica, of which the character and species were, 
not long ago, detailed in the Bot. Mag., and it is very different 
from Sisyrinchium. Its affinities are to Gelasine, Nemostylis, 
and Cipura, and it may be, that Nemostylis and Eleutherine 
will be found to range under Gelasine as sections. The pre- 
vailing colour of Gelasine and Nemostylis is blue or purple, 
of Eleutherine white. Prof. Endlicher, whose view of the 
genera of plants is valuable, because he has dealt with the 
greater part of his subject with more knowledge and discri- 
mination than he has applied to Iridacese and Amaryllidaceae, 
has thrown the genus Gelasine into Trichonema, and he would 
probably refer this plant to the same genus. He might 
as well refer it to Crocus, with which Trichonema is much 
more closely allied than with these plants. Trichonema in 
all its various species may be at once recognized in the dry 
bulb or the fruit, and may be called the lowland Crocus, ex- 
tending N. and S. from Guernsey and Jersey (of which the 
native species has been set down for a Crocus by R. & Sch.) 
to the Cape, E. and W. from Socotra to the Spanish peninsula. 
When he shall have marched a few more Sisyrinchioid de- 
tachments into the same depot, he will find very little sub- 
ordination in the corps. In arranging the hexandrous plants 
it was the duty of a person undertaking such a work to have 
examined the volume “ Amaryllidacese,” which he must have 
known from the works he quotes to have been some time pub- 
lished, and he would there have found the affinities of the 
various groups set forth upon a basis at least of tolerable cor- 
rectness, and would not have presented such an imbroglio of 
that order to the public. It is open to a person, who is fond 
of generalizing, to set forth the Cyrtanthiform, Hippeastri- 
form, and Amarylliform divisions of the order as genera, 
Cyrtanthus, Hippeastrum, and Amaryllis, and to place Val- 
lota, & c. Sprekelia, &c. Crinum, &c. as sections of them re- 
spectively, but ignorance of the subject alone could induce a 
person to preserve the subordinate Vallota, Cooperia, and 
Griffinia, as distinct genera, and pour back the rest into the 
cauldron of Amaryllidean confusion.” — W. H. 
