26 
ON THE GAMBOGE TREE OF CEYLON. 
of his Stalagmilis appeared to me, at the time I communi- 
cated my observations to the Royal Society, so enigmatical, 
that I felt unable to form an opinion as to what it is ; but I ex- 
pressed my fears that the statement of Wight and Arnott only 
threw out another temptation to blunder ; for Murray says, 
that in his plant, the flowers are arranged on a common foot- 
stalk, generally more than an inch long, in the axils of the 
leaves, jointed and bearing the pedicels, which are twice the 
length of the flowers themselves, in verticels at the joints, and 
that the fruit is globular, white, slightly reddened on one side, 
and sometimes twice the size of a large cherry ; while Lou- 
reiro and Choisy describe their plant as having clustered nearly 
sessile flowers, with a pear-shaped reddish-yellow fruit, two 
inches in diameter. Wight and Arnott further say, that the 
Stalagmitis cambogioides of Moon is the Xanthochymus 
ovalifolius of Roxburgh ; but Roxburgh describes his plant as 
having a three-celled ovary, a fruit as large as a small apple, 
while the genus is partly characterized by the flowers having 
five petals, and by the presence of five large truncated glands, 
alternating with the fasciculi of stamens. On the other hand, 
Mrs. Walker's drawings, and specimens of the fruit sent by 
Mr. Blair to Dr. Duncan, shows that this, like the fruit oiGar- 
cinia Morella, is four-celled, and not larger than a cherry ; 
and in the specimens which Mrs. Walker has sent to me, I 
never find more than four petals, and cannot see a trace of 
these glands. I only mention these circumstances now, to 
show the inextricable confusion in which the subject lay, and 
in which it would have remained, had it not been for Mrs. 
Walker and the kindness with which Mr. Brown attended to my 
request that he would examine the specimens of Konig in the 
Banksian Herbarium. This examination has reconciled most 
of the contradictions of authors in a way which could hardly 
have been anticipated ; the authoritative specimen of Konig is 
a compound, and consists of the flowers of Xanthochymus 
ovalifolius, with what seems the branch, leaves, and fruit of 
the plant which in Ceylon yields Gamboge. I give authority 
to this statement by quoting the letter of Mr. Brown. "The 
