Page:Miscellaneousbot01brow.djvu/52

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34
GENERAL REMARKS ON THE

both these envelopes adhere to the ovarium, they may be separately traced to its base; the coloured corolla being plainly visible in the interstices of the foliaceous calyx.

Goodenoviæ, whose maximum exists in the principal parallel of New Holland, are nearly but not absolutely confined to Terra Australis; the only known exceptions to this consist of the genus Cyphia, which is peculiar to Africa, and chiefly occurs at the Cape of Good Hope; of some species of Scævola which are found within the tropics; and of Goodenovia littoralis, which is common to the shores of Terra Australis and New Zealand, and according to Cavanilles is also a native of the opposite coast of South America.


STYLIDEÆ.[1] This order, consisting of Stylidium, Levenhookia, and Forstera, I have formerly separated from Campanulaceæ, on account of its reduced number of stamina, and the remarkable and intimate cohesion of their filaments with the style, through the whole length of both organs. It differs also both from Campanulaceæ and Goodenoviæ in the imbricate æstivation of the corolla, and where its segments are unequal in the nature of the irregularity. In the relation which the parts of its flower have to the axis of inflorescence, and in the parallel septum of its capsule, it agrees with Goodenoviæ and differs from Lobelia, which, however, in some other respects it more nearly resembles.

Very different descriptions of the sexual organs in this tribe, and especially of the female, have been given by several French botanists. According to Richard the lateral appendices of the labellum in Stylidium are the real stigmata, the style being consequently considered as cohering with the tube of the corolla, and the column as consisting of stamina only. This view of the structure demands particular notice, not only from the respect to which its author is himself entitled, but because it has also been adopted by Jussieu,[2] whose arguments in support of it, and against the 562] common opinion, may be reduced to three. 1st. Were the common opinion admitted, the difficulty of conceiving so wide a difference in what he terms insertion of stamina

  1. Prodr. fl. Nov. Holl 565.
  2. Annales du mus. 18, p. 7.