“A large climbing shrub with the young shoots very 
downy. Leaves subopposite, short-petioled, from round- 
oval to oblong-cordate, entire, villous, their points triangu- 
lar and acute. Stipules none. Spikes terminal and axil- 
_ lary, villous. Flowers many, opposite, and alternate. Bractes 
- solitary, one-flowered, rhomboidal, villous, ciliate. Calyx: 
tube filiform, widening just below the 5-cleft hairy mouth. 
Petals 5, oblong-lanceolar, inserted on the mouth of the 
tube of the calyx, very hairy. Filaments short, in two al- 
ternate rows round the mouth of the tube of the calyx: 
anthers oblong, incumbent. Germen inferior, oblong; ovula 
generally 4 attached to the top of the cell: style united 
with the tube of the calyx until it reaches the stamens, 
where it parts, ending in a large 3-sided stigma even with 
the anthers.” 
The drawing was taken from a plant which flowered last 
year in the hothouse, at the nursery of Messrs. Whitley and 
Co. King’s Road, Fulham; where the species was first intro- 
duced from the Calcutta Garden. 
The corolla varies from white to rose-colour, and even 
blood red in different stages of the same flower. The fruit 
is about the size of a filbert and five-cornered. When quite 
ripe the kernel is said by Rumphius to be eatable. Though 
the plant is mentioned by Dr. Roxburgh as an aboriginal of 
Amboyna, other accounts speak of it as only naturalized 
mers having been derived from Java and the Molucca 
Islands. 
The generic name was combined by Rumphius from quis 
and qualis, and intended, as Sir James Smith has it in 
Rees’s Cyclopedia, “ to express the singular variableness of 
the plant, as if nothing could be found like it.” 
