Podocarpus spinulosus , {Smith) R. Br. 311 
which are inserted close together, appear more or less swollen and fleshy; 
they are about five or six millimetres long, and fused together except at 
the tip. The two lower bracts are about a millimetre longer than the 
upper pair; each bears, just above the point where the four bracts become 
free from one another, a single stalked anatropous ovule. Occasionally 
one of the two lower bracts is sterile, while the upper pair of bracts in all 
cases examined were both sterile. Generally one of these is developed 
more strongly than the other. Pilger (13) notes a good deal of variation 
in the bracts of P. spinulosus. Sometimes the lowest pair may be missing, 
while the other four may vary a great deal in size relatively to one 
another. The following account of the internal structure is of the normal 
case where the two lowest bracts are present, and the next two bracts are 
fertile and of approximately equal size, while the uppermost pair are also 
fairly well developed. 
The peduncle contains in transverse section a somewhat elliptical 
ring of endarch collateral bundles which anastomose somewhat. Each 
bundle is accompanied on its phloem side by a single resin canal. 
A section through the base of the fused bracts shows a similar 
structure (PI. XXI, Fig. 10 ). The bundles divide occasionally and reunite, 
the resin canals sometimes dividing as well as the bundle; in other cases 
the canal arises de novo outside one of the bundles, and occasionally it may 
be absent altogether from one of the bundles. This behaviour points to 
the canals being functionless, and there is no epithelium properly developed. 
Resin cells are extremely abundant throughout the whole of the parenchyma 
of the bracts. 
At a higher level the ring of bundles widens out in one plane, and the 
bundles then come to arrange themselves in two groups of three at opposite 
sides of the wider diameter with two bundles between them (PI. XXI, 
Figs. 11 and 13). 
The two groups at each end belong to the fertile scales and ovules, 
the bundles between them belonging one to each of the sterile scales. This 
state of affairs is intermediate between that figured by Van Tieghem (27) 
for Podocarpus sinensis , where the sterile bracts also contain each a group of 
three bundles, and that figured by Strasburger (18) for Podocarpiis chiueusis y 
Wall., apparently the same species as that described by Van Tieghem, 
where the sterile bracts have no vascular supply. In one place the stronger 
of two sterile bract bundles had two small groups of xylem elements some 
little distance away from it on the xylem side (PI. XXI, Figs. 12 and 19 ) ; 
these apparently correspond to the two inner bundles of one of the groups 
in Van Tieghem’s figures. As the bundles of the sterile bracts die out, 
some transfusion tracheides appear. 
Of the group of three bundles serving the fertile scale, the middle one, 
passes out into the bract subtending the ovule, the other two approach 
