89M 
Aboriginal Name." Stunga " of the aborigines of the Richmond and 
Clarence Rivers, New South Wales, according to the late Mr. Charles Moore. Because 
the aborigines used the wood for shields, it is one of those known as Heilaman-tree. 
Aboriginal plant names are becoming increasingly difficult to procure, chiefly 
because the aborigines are becoming scarce, as well as the plants. When the aborigines 
were numerous, knowledge of our native plants was in a very different state from what 
it is to-day, and so it is that many of the aboriginal names for trees, &c., given in the 
older works of Australian travel and exploration, cannot be associated with the plants 
to which they refer, and, therefore, are merely interesting to the philologist as 
combinations of syllables. The late Sir William Macarthur did much to record the 
native names of plants found in what I may term the " home counties," and he took 
steps to assign the botanical names wherever he could. Aborigines are difficult to deal 
with, because the answers they give in reply to questions on the subject are often liable 
to be misunderstood, for they are not plant names at all. It requires much tact and 
knowledge of the blacks to bring out the plant knowledge they possess, and since they 
are coming more frequently into contact with the whites, they find that there is less 
and less necessity for such knowledge of the uses of plants as was indispensable to them 
in their wild state. This is, of course, a digression, but it is a reasonable one, and I 
venture to express the hope that residents in the country will interest themselves in 
this question of local names. 
Synonym. B. discolor F.v.M., Fragm., i, i (1858). 
Leaves. Attention is invited to a short paper " Notes on Sterculia (Brachy- 
chiton) lurida and discolor " by the present writer and the late Mr. E. Betche in 
Proc. Linn. Soc., N.S.W., xxiii, p. 159 (1898). Reference was made to a recent 
revision of the genus Brachychiton by Professor A. Terracino (" Le specie de genere 
Brachychiton, " Bolletino del R. Orto Botanico di Palmero, Anno 1, Fasc. ii, 1897), and 
from our paper the following extracts are taken : 
' The only difference indicated in the Flora Australiensis is in the leaves, which 
are ' angular and very shortly and irregularly five or seven lobed and white underneath, 
with a very close tomentum ' in S. discolor, and ' deeply five or seven lobed and 
pubescent underneath but not white ' in S. lurida. The flowers and fruits appear to 
be exactly the same in both species. The difference in the leaves in the two extreme 
forms is so great that nothing short of the fact that we have seen both forms of leaves 
growing on the same tree could induce us to adopt Professor Terracino's view of uniting 
the two species. 
The tall trees of S. lurida in the Sydney Botanic Gardens are about forty years 
old, and were probably planted shortly after Mr. Moore's discovery of the species in 
1858, from seeds or young seedling plants brought by him from the original locality 
(Clarence River). All these old trees have now either completely changed into S. discolor 
