DESCRIPTIVE LIST OF NEW PLANTS. 
233 
betrays its real character; for it differs in no particular from that 
of Cereus . The whole habit of the plant is, however, so unlike 
any other cactaceous plant, that for consistency’s sake, if Cereus 
and Echinocactus be natural and good genera, this will consti¬ 
tute a genus apart; and I willingly adopt a name by which this 
plant is said to be known on the Continent, although I have 
failed to find the place where any such name is recorded. Our 
plants were obtained for us from the neighbourhood of Rio del 
Monte, Mexico, through the favour of John Taylor, Esq. It 
flowers in the summer months. Our largest plant is a foot high, 
its main trunk erect, but crooked, as thick as a man’s arm, 
clothed with the dense mass of the persistent bases of old mam¬ 
millae ; above they gradually appear more perfect, at first, short 
and truncated, till the crown of the plant is clothed with perfectly 
formed mammillae, four or five inches long, glaucous green, 
succulent, triangular, truncated at the apex, and there bearing 
six or seven long chaffy, or almost horny, linear-subulate, flexuose 
scales, of which the central one is about as long as the" mam¬ 
millae, and the others, forming a whorl round the centre, are about 
two or three inches long. From near the centre of the summit 
of the plant the large sulphur-coloured flowers appear, solitary, 
from the axil of a mammillae; they are formed of a number 
of imbricated, oblong, greenish scales, gradually passing upwards 
into longer and more coloured scales, till they spread into a long 
ray of numerous, yellow, acute, linear, glossy petals, giving four 
inches and more to the diameter of the blossom.— Bot. Mag. 4393. 
MELASTOMACEiE. —Tviandvia Monogynia. 
Sonerilla stricta (Hooker.) This, as far as I know, is the 
first species of the genus that has yet been cultivated in Europe. 
The seeds were received by Messrs. Veitch and Son, of Exeter, 
from Mr. T. Lobb, who collected them in Java. Flowering 
specimens were sent to me in May 1848. At first sight, and 
especially in the leaves, this has very little the appearance of a 
melastomaceous plant, and the trimerous character of the flower 
is at variance with most of the genera. 
It is an interesting little annual, with a slender, erect, branching 
stem, a span or more high ; the leaves are small, dark green 
above, and red purple beneath. The flowers, of three spreading 
deep rose petals, are produced six to nine together on a terminal 
m. 20 
