DESCRIPTIVE LIST OF NEW PLANTS. 
257 
the Lycopodium lepidophyllum , from Western Mexico; the 
other the capsules of certain South African species of Fig- 
Marigold. 
The rose of Jericho (as little or less like a rose than a cabbage) 
is a plant humble and insignificant in appearance, yet the atten¬ 
tion of Eastern travellers has long been directed to it, on account 
of the hygrometric qualities of the old withered annual stems, 
which are rolled up like a ball in dry weather, uprooted by the 
storms of the deserts in Syria and Egypt, and drifted about by 
the winds. If rain falls, the branches are restored to their 
original direction; and again, in dry weather, they become 
involute ; and this property the plant retains after many years. 
The most absurd fables have been circulated respecting the 
virtues of this plant, and greedily believed by the vulgar. The 
plant is rare in cultivation, and only preserved by annually 
securing the seeds. Our figures were made in part from specimens 
out of Mr. Borrer’s garden, at Henfield, and in part from the 
Royal Garden of Kew. The plant is an annual, branching from 
the top of its somewhat fusiform root; everywhere hoary, with 
dense stellated hairs; the leaves are spathulate, the lower ones 
entire, the upper ones remotely toothed. Racemes lateral, 
generally arising from a little above the fork of a branch, erect, 
rigid, almost spiny, bearing seven or eight nearly sessile, in¬ 
conspicuous flowers. The succeeding silicule is remarkable for 
its two large orbicular ears.— Bot. Mag. 4400. 
Malvace/E. —MonadelpJiia Polyandria. 
Hibiscus ferox (Hooker). One of the most distinct of the 
many forms of Hibiscus, and remarkable for the copious tuber- 
culated aculei, often tipped with red. It seems to have escaped 
the observation of every traveller, till Mr. Purdie met with it 
near Iratcho, in New Grenada, and sent home specimens and 
seeds. The whole plant, he observes, is “ full of irritating spines.” 
In four years’ time the plant has with us attained a height ot 
many feet, clothed with such copious, tuberculated, rigid, short, 
prickles, as to give the appearance rather of some virulent nettle, 
than an emollient Hibiscus. It is treated as a stove-plant, and 
flowered in May 1848. The plant is an upright-growing, arbo¬ 
rescent shrub, leafy, chiefly at the summit, and there slightly 
22 
hi. 
