Native of the East Indies, where it grows in rocky and 
sandy tracts to a large tree, the trunk of which is some- 
times from two to three feet in diameter. 
The drawing was made last summer from the first of the 
species cultivated here; still in the hothouse of Sir Abraham 
Hume at Wormleybury, in Hertfordshire; where it had been 
introduced by Lady Amelia Hume in 1787. 
Willdenow, viewing the column in both the sterile and 
the fertile flowers as an integral and independent member, 
has ranked the genus in the class Doprcanpria. In the | 
Hortus Kewensis, after Linnzeus, the genus stands in 
Monascra Monapetpuia, the column, when from the failure — 
of the germen it supports only anthers, being designated as 
the monadelphous union of the filaments of the stamens, 
and, by a whimsical and arbitrary conversion of terms, 
when it supports the perfect germen as well as anthers, as 
the independent and common pediment of both organs. Its 
true place seems to us to be in Monascra Potyanpria. 
Leaves membranous, scattered, reflectent, ovally or 
obversely oblong, bright green, from six inches to a foot in 
length, nearly three times longer than broad, terminated 
by an abrupt slanted point, midrib prominent beneath 
nerves lateral alternate distant studded underneath with 
composite stellate hairs: petioles round thickened at both 
ends: stipules growing on the branch, small, subulate, 
pubescent, caducous. Racemes long, flexile, growing from 
their proper buds in a panicle round the terminal leafless 
- brown and stellately pubescent shoots of the branches, 
many, diffusely divaricate, composite, loosely many-flow- 
ered, flexuose, brownly villous; partial peduncles distant, 
from one to several flowered; proper pedicles filiform, diva- 
ricate, jointed above the middle: bractes minute. Flowers, 
when extended, scarcely half an inch across, of a dull yel- 
lowish or greenish white, externally brownly pubescent. Calyx 
turbinately campanulate; limb 5-parted, longer than the 
tube, segments converging archwise and united at their 
points with open intervals, lanceolately linear with reflectent 
sides. Column half the length of the calyx, round; smooth, 
upright, dilated at top. -Anthers didymous, placed round 
the rim of the apex of the column. Germen scarlet, hirsute, 
3-5-lobed, globular: style bending downwards along the side 
of the germen, that the stigma may reach the anthers: stig~ 
ma 3-d-lobed, rounded. 
—<>—— 
a The column bearing the germen 94 >>*ars, 
