. The natural history of plants. Botany. 160 NATUEAL EISTOBY OF PLANTS. rescence is a ramified cluster of umbellules, with articulate pedicels. The obconical receptacle is surmounted by a depressed disk crenelate at the margin. There is no calyx \ the petals are triangular, valvate, with stellate hairs, and the bilocular ovary is crowned with two slender stylary branches. The fruit is ovoid or obovate, with a nearly circular transverse section, or a Kttle compressed perpendicular to the partition, drupaceous, but a little fleshy and enclosing two often concave putamens. Horsfieldia has the flo
. The natural history of plants. Botany. 160 NATUEAL EISTOBY OF PLANTS. rescence is a ramified cluster of umbellules, with articulate pedicels. The obconical receptacle is surmounted by a depressed disk crenelate at the margin. There is no calyx \ the petals are triangular, valvate, with stellate hairs, and the bilocular ovary is crowned with two slender stylary branches. The fruit is ovoid or obovate, with a nearly circular transverse section, or a Kttle compressed perpendicular to the partition, drupaceous, but a little fleshy and enclosing two often concave putamens. Horsfieldia has the flower of Astrotricha, except that the stylopods represent a conical enlargement of the base of the style, and the two mericarps constituting the fruit, scarcely drupaceous, separate from each other at maturity like those of Myodocarpus. They are shrubs from Java, Japan and North America, with prickly stems and woolly or tomentose surfaces, peltate or cordate, palmatifid or palmatilobed leaves, and flowers in numerous small capituliform umbels, with involucres and sessile all along the axes of a large ramified spike. One of the oldest genera of this group is Schefflera, established by FoESTEB, in 1776, for an oceanic plant whose flowers (fig. 200) are pentamerous, with a concave, ob- conical or obpyramidal receptacle ; the margin bears a very short calyx with dentiform'sepals, five valvate petals and five alternate stamens. The ovary, inferior and surmounted by an undulate disk, contains from five to ten uniovulate cells, and is surmounted by a coni- cal style of the same number of divisions varying in form with age. At first short, obtuse, indistinct, they increase in the fruit and take the form of branches with a some- what enlarged stigmatiferous extremity, especially in the fertile flowers. The ovary becomes a drupe, the putamens of which, five to ten in number, enclose each a compressed seed. The two Scheffleras hitherto described inhabit New Zealand, the Viti isles and New C
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, booksubjectbotany, bookyear1871
