THE T A S M A N 1 A N NAT U R A LI ST 
Casmaman I^satbs* 
By L. RODWAY. 
UEATH is a popular name and means more or less according to the 
idea of the user. Some use it to denote any twiggy flowering 
plants that grow in moorland ; others restrict it to the group commonly 
called Ericas. Botanists generally use it in this sense, with the reser¬ 
vation that they may, for convenience, extend it to the whole family to 
which the heaths belong. When they so extend it, they necessarily 
include many plants that do not accord with the popular idea of a heath 
For instance, when a botanist calls an Azalea or a Grasstree a heath he 
generally raises on his audience a look of incredulity. He really means 
these plants belong to the same group as those commonly termed heaths. 
The heath family in its largest sense is well defined, large, and of almost 
worldwide distribution, but it is naturally divisible into two ; each division 
is now treated as a distinct family. One, of which our garden Erica is 
the type, is of very wide distribution in Africa, Europe and North 
America ; and has also a few representatives in other parts. We have 
four species of this family, the commonest being our pretty white cluster 
berry. Amongst the unheathlike member of this family, that may be 
found in our gardens, are Andromeda, Arbutus, Azalea, Kalmia and 
Rhododendron. A mark of the family is that there are twice as many 
stamens as there are lobes to the corolla, that is, they are usually ten, 
and their antlers are bilocular, and discharge their pollen through 
terminal pores or short openings. The other family, of which our 
common heath or Epacris is the type, bears stamens of the same number 
as the corolla lobes, and at maturity the antlers open by a single 
longitudinal slit. It is almost confined to Australia and adjacent regions. 
Few species extend to the Indian Archipelago in one direction, and one 
only to South America in the other; none is found in South Africa. 
We can, therefore, call this the family of Australian Heaths. It contains 
its unheathlike forms as in our Mountain Grasstree. In a typical 
member of this family the corolla is a tube ending in five lobes, and the 
stamens are joined to the petals. This has led to an erroneous placnig 
of the family in proximity to Solatium, Convolvulus and such. We 
occasionally find species with the corolla evidently made up of separate 
petals, and the stamens inserted into the torus. This and other reasons 
indicate that, though heath, by its tubular corolla appears to belong to 
the division of plants with united petals, it is only an apparant relation¬ 
ship, not a real one. The more our study of flowers progress, the more 
difficult appears their classification. We can sort plants into groups or 
orders with tolerable certainty, but when we wish to go further we find 
we still have to be satisfied with an arbitrary arrangement. 
The family of Australian heaths is divisible into two tribes 
characterised by a difference of fruit. In the first, of which Styphelia 
is used as the type, each carpel bears one ovule and the fruit has a fleshy 
