ae me 
upwards, andsmaller, covered underneath with narrow close- 
set silvery white lines formed of minute scurfy scales, im- 
bricately fascicled below and faintly purple at the inner 
side, outer ones generally more or less revolute, inner ones 
straighter, gradually higher, but all are overtopped by the 
flower-spike. Scape simple, cylindrical, scarcely thicker 
than the tube of a swan-quill, central, even with the 
leaves, white and woolly, upright, forming a club with the 
inflorescence, beset on all sides quite up to the spike by 
thin light brown membranous darker-nerved spathe-like 
longly lanceolate finely tapered loosely imbricated wideset 
flowerless bractes. Spike strobiliform, oblong, obtuse (two 
inches long or more?), twice the diameter of a man’s 
thumb, disposed in six? widish-set rows, woolly: flowers 
bracteless? sessile, projecting, about half an inch long, 
tubular, loosely arranged in whorls of threes, alternate in 
relation to a six-ranked order, immerged at the base in the 
wool of the scape. Germen short, with nearly the same 
circumference as the calyx, scariose, green, transparent, 
cylindrical, with three short vertical wings formed by its 
compressed taper-edged angles, marked with darker veins 
reticulately confluent at the base, many-seeded, white- 
woolled at the upper part ; ovules in several-fold order, im- 
bricated upwards, ovately oblong, fixed to the inner corners 
of the cell by a somewhat clubbed diaphanous thick succu- 
lent strophiola or umbilical pedicle. Calyx continuous 
with the germen, pale green, roundly three-cornered ; leaf- 
lets three, thick, hard, fleshy, converging into a short 
tube and deeply imbricated at their sides, downy white on 
the outside. Petals 3, of a black purple colour, stiff, 
straight, erectly convergent, about a third longer than the 
calyx, with a linearly oblong involutely hollowed lamina 
truncately retuse and eroded at the top, and a broad short 
unguis of the same colour and crowned across the top on 
the inside by a curled fringe of the same colour. Stamens 
enclosed, upright, three alternate ones shorter, with jila- 
- ments much shorter than the anther, and inserted at the top 
of the unguis, the three others with slenderer longer fila- 
ments inserted at the thickened summit of the germen: 
anthers linearly long, pale, turned inwards, upright, move- 
able, suspended by their back to the fine pointed top of the 
filament. Style upright, enclosed, of the colour of the 
filaments: stigmata three, widened into a lobular form, 
short, sooner or later united by twisting. 
