We have named..the species in compliment to Captain 
Clayering, the commander of His Majesty’s Sloop of war, 
the Pheasant,.in which the Horticultural Society’s collec- 
tor was carried from the coast of Africa to South America. 
To thé protection and liberal assistance of this officer, and 
of Captain Sabine, who accompanied him, the happy result 
of the Society’s mission is principally to be ascribed. 
., The genus Catasetum is an instance of the rapid pro- 
gress our knowledge of Orchideous plants has made 
within a few months. In 1823, -one species only had 
been published, the Catasetum maculatum of M. Kunth, 
upon which the genus may be said to have been founded, 
the C. macrocarpon of Tiichard being scarcely known 
except by name. Before the publication, however, of 
the work of M. Kunth, in which the genus was esta- 
blished, two other plants had been seen in this country, 
both of which still remain to be recorded; the one was a 
plant which, some time before 1817, flowered in the garden 
at Kew, where it was called Lockhartia, but which has not 
been since seen in any other collection; the second was sent 
from Brazil, by Mr. Swainson, to Dr. Hooker, in whose 
‘garden, at Halesworth, it produced its blossoms soon after 
its arrival. Of the first, our recollection is not sufficient 
to enable us to speak more particularly. The second is a 
plant with globose greenish flowers in a long raceme, with 
a bright green labellum mottled with purple in the inside : 
we long ago proposed to call this, species C. Hookeri. In 
the autumn of 1823, a plant from Bahia de St. Salvador, 
in every respect agreeing with Catasetum in habit, flowered 
‘in the garden of the Horticultural Society. In the floral 
envelope, however, it offered some striking variations from 
the characters which had been observed to be common to 
-the-species previously noticed. The perianthium was not 
closed, but in some measure spread open, and by no means 
‘globose ; the labellum was neither concave, nor fleshy, nor 
“even in its natural position, but generally anterior with re- 
spect to the other parts of the flower, nearly flat, and 
strongly crested with fleshy processes; in other particulars, 
however, especially in the two horns of the columna, the 
cornute form of the anthera, and the peculiar structure of 
the pollen-masses and appendages, it agreed with the cha- 
racter of the genus. This species we have called. C. cris- 
tatum.—In the 8th part of Dr. Hooker’s Exotic Flora, ‘a 
