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Show ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 347 hot spring of Pezce near Groswardein, in Hungary) j the species of N elumbo; Euryale amazonica of Poppig; and the Victoria Regina discovered in 1837 by Sir Robert Schomburgk in the River Berbice in British Guiana, and which is allied to the prickly Em·yale, although, according to Lindley, a very different genus. The round leaves of this magnificent water plant are six feet in diameter, and are surrounded by turned up margins 3 to 5 inches high, light green inside, and bright crimson outside. The agreeably perfumed flowers, twenty or thirty blossoms of which may be seen at the same time within a small space, are white and rose colored, 15 inches in diameter, and have many hundred petals. (Rob. Schomburgk, Reisen in Guiana und am Orinoko, 1841, s. 233.) Poppig also gives to the leaves of his Euryale amazonica which he found near Tefe, as much as 5 feet 8 inches French, or 6 English feet, diameter. (Poppig, Reise in Chile, Peru und auf dem Amazonenstrome, bd. ii. 1836, s. 432.) If Euryale and Victoria are the genera which present the greatest extension in all dimensions of the parenchyma of the leaves, the greatest known dimensions of a flower belong to a parasitical Cytinea, the Raffiesia Arnoldi (R. Brown), discovered by Dr. Arnold in Sumatra, in 1818 : it has a stemless flower of three English feet diameter, surrounded by large leaf-like scales. Funguslike, it has an animal smell, resembling beef. C5 ) p. 243.-" Lianes, ?·ope-plants, ('Bush ?'Opes;' in Spanish, Vefuccos.") According to Kunth's division of the Bauhiniere, the true genus Bauhinia belongs to the New Continent: the African Bauhinia, B. rufescens (Lam.), is a Pauletia (Cav.), a genus of which we found some new species in South America. So also the Banisterias, from among the Malpighiacere, are properly an American form j although two species are natives of India, and one species, Banisteria leona, described by Cavanilles, is a native of Western Africa. Within the tropics and in the Southern Hemisphere, we find among the most different families of plants the twining rope-like climbers which in those regions render the forests at once so impenetrable to man, and on the other hand so accessible and habitable to the Quadrumanre (or Monkeys), and to the Cercoleptes and the small tiger-cats. The |
