104 
A NOTE ON INDIAN WHEAT RUSTS. 
plant comes into flower in February in Bengal, Behar, Central India, 
and Rajputana, In Oudh and the Punjab it is about a month later 
of flowering. It fruits in Bengal about the middle of March. For 
a description of its yellow flowers and its fruits, on which its identity 
depends, but which, its identity being established, do not interest us 
in this connection, reference may be made to systematic treatises. 
The inflorescences, however, on which these flowers and fruits are 
borne consist of branches that arise in the axils of from one to five 
of the leaves nearest the centre of the crown. The corresponding 
buds in the axils of those leaves that do not subtend inflorescences 
remain as small bodies covered with rather longish white hairs. By 
the middle or end of the hot weather, as a rule, all trace of the crown 
and its leaves has disappeared ; these rhizomes that in May and June 
are still crowned with leaves have their leaves, even when the plant 
is growing in shady grassy spots, thick and fleshy as in the case of 
plants growing in the open sun in the cold weather. 
In diseased plants the uredospores appear in rusty-red pustules 
that are almost always confined to the upper surface of the leaves ; 
this is not, however, universal, for sometimes they occur on the lower 
surface of the leaves ; occasionally they are to be found, though this 
is very rare, in patches that burst through the epidermis of the 
rachis and branches of the inflorescence. These uredosporic pustules 
exhibit essentially the characters exhibited by the corresponding 
pustules on the leaves of wheat, but as a rule they are of larger size. 
The teleutospores occur perhaps most frequently on the under- 
surface of the leaves ; it is, however, much more usual to find teleutos- 
pores on the upper surface than to find uredospores beneath. And 
it is not at all essential that the two be present together ; in certain 
cases indeed it was impossible to find teleutospores on the Launea 
and vice versa. The presence of a teleutosporic patch is usually 
foreshadowed by pallid discoloration of a circumscribed area on the 
leaf ; over this spot the epidermis very soon gives way ; either gener- 
ally, in which case there is a large iriegular black patch of exposed 
teleutospores ; or in a central medium-sized patch with a series of 
small black patches arranged round the central one in 3—5 concentric 
rings. Not uncommonly black teleutosporic patches are to be met 
with along the rachis of the inflorescence ; these are always much 
smaller than the patches on the leaves, and sometimes the epider- 
mis above them remains intact. 
The aecidial fructifications sometimes make their appearance in 
what, from their position with reference to the rhizome and the other 
