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BOTANICAL NETVS. 279
" The paragraph extracted from one of mj letters, which you pubUshed on
the 27th February last, about the gigantic Aroid discorered by me in the
mountains of Is^icaragua, has had the good fortune to make the rounds, not
only of the English and Continental papers, but also of the American, and
been commented upon in many ways, even by your facetious contemporary
' Punch.' I dare say some thought, when reading of the dimensions of the
plant, that I, when penning that paragraph, allowed my imagination to run
riot, and was dishing up a mere traveller's tale. But I took the precaution to
preserve the flowers in spmt, and send to Mr. Wilham Bull two fine rhizomes
of the plant. Both of the latter are now growing, and one of them, received
in England only on the I7th of April, is now in a fair way of proving that I
rather understated than overstated the case. It is in a pot of only eleven
inches in diameter, and on the 28th of Jime, the petiole of the leaf (the plant
has only one leaf at a time) was seven feet high and nine inches in circumference.
The blade is not yet developed, and I believe that before tliis communication
sees the light, the petiole wUl have attained more than ten feet, the
height it had in Ificaragua. It looks like a huge snake (beautifully mottled)
standing bolt upright at the command of some Eastern charmer. I may add
that the leaf in the present state already exceeds the largest recorded dimensions
of aU other Aroidece with a hke habit, and, when fully developed, it will turn
out to be what I said it would, the largest Aroid, both in leaf and flower, of
which we have cognizance. The flowers being hermaphrodite, not diclinous,
the giant in question cannot be referred to Amorphophallus, Conophallus, or
allied genera of the Eastern hemisphere, but will, on closer investigation, prove
to be either a genuine Dracontium, or the representative of a closely allied new
genus, which ' Punch ' has asked me to name after Gog and Magog. Yielding
to the request, it would not be the first barbaric name we should have in botany,
and probably not the last either ; and who knows what, after due consultation
with the City Corporation, I may do?"
Capt. B. Pim, R.N., iu liis part of tlie ' Do'ttings,' confines himself
principally to Jamaica and Mosquito, and except a note on India-
Rubber Collecting, which had previously appeared in this Journal,
there are but few botanical facts. It may be useful to add that the
creeper which the Rubber collectors use for thickening the milky juice
of the trees, and which Dr. Seemann from native description conjec-
tured to be an Apocynea, has now been ascertained by him to be a
Convolvulacea, Calonyction speciosum.
BOTANICAL NEWS.
Under the title ' Echoes in Plant and Flower Life,' Mr. Leo H. Grindon has
published (London, Pitman) a small book on the superficial resemblances in
habit and structure of plants whose inner organization is widely different, and
to which the term" Mimicry " (see Yol. YI. pp. 182, 213), had previously, but
erroneously, been apphed.
Died, after a short illness, on the 15th of July, at Tephtz, Hcinrich Ludwig