i^totiotientiron ^ocietp Sotesi. 
like that of a tumbler, often with slightly bulging base, having a wall of but 
slightly elongated cells and the mouth is somewhat ragged and split into fringed 
segments which are not greatly prolonged. There is in consequence less holding 
together of the hairs by interlocking of the branches than is found in some other 
species, and the cup-hairs of the older leaves readily separate from one another 
as Uttle granules. As regards the flower. Hooker f. in 1893 when writing of R. 
ExiMiUM pointed out that the plant which he found on Tonglo, and described as 
R. Falconeri, was an aberrant starved one with small pure white flowers 
without a basal purple blotch, not the creamy or yellow-white blotched form 
that is commonly associated with the plant. I find that the filaments of the 
usually 16 stamens are sometimes quite glabrous, sometimes puberulous ; that 
the many-chambered (I find usually 16 chambers) ovary has a covering of glands 
some on long some on short stalks, and this glandular character distinguishes 
R. Falconeri and its microforms from all other members of its series. In most 
typical forms the ovary has a dense tomentum of fasciate hairs with long cylindric 
branches so many as to cover entirely the glands which, however, indicate their 
presence by the stickiness they impart to the indumentum, and they are easily 
described by dissection. Perhaps this hiding of them under the hairs accounts 
for the omission of mention of the glands in descriptions, for instance, by Clarke 
in the Flora of British India. But in cases the number of hairs is fewer 
and then the glands are exposed and the ovarian surface ghstens with secretion. 
Moreover the glands extend from the ovary over the lower part of the style. If 
you find a member of the Falconeri Series with a glandular ovary you may 
assume that it is R. Falconeri or one of its microforms (including in that 
designation R. eximium). It will be gathered from what I have said that there 
are many variations in flower-character which require analysis and correlation 
with vegetative differences before we know the limits that mark off R. Falconeri 
as a species. 
Rhododendron fictolacteum, Bal/. f. 
[Figured as R. lacteum in Bot. Mag. (1911) t. 8372]. 
[syn. R. LACTEUM var. macrophyllum. Branch.]. 
The story of R. fictolacteum will be found in the Gardeners’ Chronicle for 
1916, and in the Transactions of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh of 
the same year. Here it is only necessary to say that the plant is the R. lacteum 
var. macrophyllum of Franchet, and was discovered in 1886 by Delavay, near 
Langkiung, not far N.E. from Talifu, in Western Yunnan, at an elevation of 
3,200 m. The plant is in cultivation from seeds sent by Delavay to the Jardin 
des Plantes, Paris, and flowered for the first time in Europe in 1910 with Mr. 
Godman at South Lodge, Horsham. It seems to be hardy. In the earlier years 
of its cultivation it was called R. lacteum which belongs to a different series 
of the genus having a velvety underleaf indumentum of one stratum. R. 
fictolacteum is a typical member of the Falconeri Series. As we know it, it 
has the most extended distribution of all the Chinese members of the Falconeri 
Series, and has been collected in abundance by Forrest on all his journeys, but 
curiously enough only three sets of his specimens have flowers. Delavay’s 
213 
