292 
CONTRIBUTIONS TO BOTANY. 
acute angles on the summit and sides, and finely denticulated 
along the margins ; four remarkably thick and fieshy petals 
tapering at base and swelling into a clavated, emarginated, or 
scrotiform shape, subhyaline ; four sterile stamens half as long as 
the petals, and four gibbous glabrous ovaries, each wdth a sud- 
denly deflected style, cleft at its summit into two subdivergent 
stigmata. The pedicels in fruit grow to double their former 
length, crowned by a small receptacle supporting a glabrous 
nearly globular drupe, 3-4 lines in diameter (the other carpels 
being abortive) : the putamen reniformly orbicular, compressed, 
with tuberculately rugose sides, in a lunate form, encii’cling the 
more depressed scutiform exeentral eondyle, which does not 
sensibly intrude internally ; the integument fills the entire cell, 
attached by a short funicle to the margin of the condyle ; it is 
filled with soft albumen, but the embryo was in too undeveloped 
a state to be detected. The fruit seen and described by Dr. 
Mueller does not appear to have been in a more mature stage. 
41. Hyperb.®na. 
This genus was proposed by me in 1851 for a plant which I 
found in the neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro, that had only 
male flowers. As its fruit was then unknown, the genus was 
placed among those of dubious position. At that time also, for 
want of better knowledge, the fruit of Cocculus Domingensis, DC., 
was supposed to belong to Anelasma (the fruit of which was also 
unknown) — a supposition suggested by the circumstance, then 
mentioned, of the remarkable similarity in the external aspects 
of the species of Hyperbcnna and Anelasma. Soon afterwards I 
ascertained that Cocculus Domingensis, of which ^ flowers only 
were then known, belonged to Hyperbcena ; and having seen its 
fruit, I was thus enabled to place it with confidenee in the ex- 
albuminous tribe of the Pachygonece. The authors of the ‘ Ge- 
nera Plantarum ’ (i. 38) state that Hyperbcena scarcely differs 
from Cocculus, except in its seed ; but those botanists appear to 
have entertained a general but not very defined idea of the real 
strueture of Cocculus. In Hyperbcena the form of the petals is 
different : they are always more oval, never linear, nor with 
deeply inflected basal lobes j the anthers are otherwise con- 
structed and differently affixed; added to which, the mode of 
inflorescence in both sexes is so distinct, and the aspect of the 
leaves so remarkable, that it is always easy to discriminate one 
genus from the other by a mere glance at the specimens. The 
leaves are usually oblong, with an acuminate apex, coria- 
ceous, glabrous, shining, with distant nervures all alternating 
