Page:Miscellaneousbot01brow.djvu/339

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
COLLECTED BY CAPTAIN STURT.
321

all these localities, and am satisfied that they belong to one and the same species.

In March (not May), 1818, Mr. Cunningham, who accompanied Cai)tain King in his voyages of survey of the coasts of New Holland, found on one of the islands of Dampier's Archipelago, a plant which he then regarded as identical with that of Regent's Lake. This appears from the following passage of his MS. Journal:

"I was not a little surprised to find Kennedya speciosa (his original name for Clianthus Oxleyi), a plant discovered in July, 1817, on sterile, bleak, open fiats, near Regent's Lake, on the River Lachlan, in lat. 33° 13′ S. and long. 116° 40′ E. It is not common; I could see only three plants, of which one was in flower." "This island is the Isle Malus of the French." Mr. Cunningham was not then aware of the figure and description in Dampicr above referred to, which, however, in his communication to the Horticultural Society in 1834, he quotes for the plant of the Isle Malus, then regarded by him as a distinct species from his Clianthus Oxleyi of the River Lachlan. To this opinion he was probably in part led by the article Donia or Clianthus, in Don's System of Gardening and Botany, vol. 2, p. 468, in which a third species of the genus is introduced, founded on a specimen in Mr. Lambert's Herbarium, said to have been discovered at Curlew River, by Captain King. This species, named Clianthus Dampieri by Cunningham, he characterises as having leaves of a slightly different form, but its ])rincipal distinction is in its having racemes instead of umbels ; at the same time he confidently refers to Dam- pier's figure and description, both of which prove the flowers to be umbellate, as he describes those of his Clian- thus Oxleyi to be. But as the flowers in this last plant [73 are never strictly umbellate, and as I have met with specimens in which they are rather corymbose, I have no hesitation in referring Dampier's specimen, which many years ago I examined at Oxford, as well as Cunningham's, to Clianthus Dam])ieri. This specimen, however, cannot now be found in

his Herbarium, as Mr. Ilcward, to whom he bequeathed his

21