The Genus Mussaendopsis Baill. (Rub.)

The genus Mussaendopsis was created by B a i 11 o n in 1879 for a tree found by B e c c a r i in Sarawak, Borneo. As it appeared afterwards, the same species occurs also in the Malay Peninsula, on the islands between the latter and Borneo, and in Sumatra. On specimens collected in the Malay Peninsula, in 1884 the genus Creaghia S c o r t. was founded. The descriptions of the two genera are very similar, and as Mussaendopsis B a i 11. is not mentioned by Scortechini, we may safely assume that B a i 11 o n’s publication was unknown to him. The identity of the two genera was disclosed by K. S c h u m a n n in his monograph of the family jn Engleret Prantl. Subsequently the plant was dealt with by Stapf, King and Gamble, Ridley and Lemee. None of the descriptions, however, is entirely satisfactory, and this applies also to the figure given by Stapf in Hooker’s leones 1 lantarum: exactly as in the original description the stamens spring here from the top of the ovary instead of from the corolla tube, a mistake which had been rectified already bij K. Schumann. The most noteworthy deficiency in the various descriptions regards the position of the stipules. By Bâillon they were described as mterpetiolar; the other authors are silent on this point. Bâillon, KiWeVer’ Was m'sta^cn: are intrapetiolar. This is very remarkable, for stipules of this kind are extremely rare. When I found them some years ago in the genus Didymoecium, I went through all the generic descriptions given by Bentham and Hooker and bY K. Schumann, and discovered that their presence had been announced already in several other genera. A reinvestigation, however> kd to an entirely different result: of all these genera Capirona proved to be the only one in which thev reallv occur. Mussaendopsis, therefore, is the third genus in which this kind of stipules has been observed.