PLANTS JAVANIOE RAIU0RES. 615
fruit to that of S.fceticla, both being figured in the volume of drawings already referred to. These were the only materials he appears ever to have examined, and his own herbarium contained absolutely nothing except a single leaf of S. fcetida : the generic character consequently remains unchanged in all his subsequent works.
In 'Flora Zeylanica,' Linnaeus correctly includes Sterculia in his Class Moncecia, notices the imperfect stamina in the female flower, and only overlooks the minute rudiments of ovaria in the male flower. He referred the genus to his Natural Order Tricoccce (very nearly correspond- ing with the Euphorbiacece of Jussieu), as appears first in c Philosophia Botanica,' published in 1751, and afterwards in the sixth edition of his 'Genera Plantarum' in 1764. In this determination of its affinity he was followed by Bernard de Jussieu in 1759, by Adanson in 1763 ; and in a manuscript list of the arrangement of plants adopted in 1779 in the Paris Garden, I find Sterculia still placed in the same family. The generic character of Sterculia, as given by Linnaeus, who does not notice, and had no oppor- tunity of ascertaining the structure of the seed, might with very slight alteration stand for that of the whole tribe, Heritiera alone excepted.
In the order of time, the next work in which the same genus is described, though under a different name, is Aublet's ' History of the Plants of French Guiana/ 1 which appeared in 1775. He describes his genus Ivira, which all subsequent botanists have referred to Sterculia, as having hermaphrodite flowers, with ten stamina, and the capsules or follicles surrounded at the base with rigid filiform pro- cesses, formed as he states by the enlargement of the hairs which according to him exist in the flowering state. But from an examination of the specimens in his own herba- rium (purchased by Sir Joseph Banks and now in the British Museum), as well as from others collected in the same country by the late celebrated Professor Richard, it appears that the flowers are unisexual ; that the hairs of the
1 p. 095, t. 279.
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