Dear Sir,

On Friday (21st) I sent you some living plants of the Araujia sericofera, which I hope have reached you in good condition. I have now the pleasure of enclosing a packet of seeds of the same, received in a letter from my friend in Oporto.¹ The plant being common there, the gardeners do not keep the seed; which was the only cause of the delay in obtaining it.

I observe that recent writers refer the Araujia of Brotero to Physianthus. P. albens, (Bot. Reg. N.S. III. 1832, vol. 6.) closely resembles my plant in leaves, flowers, and general appearance. The description says:—“Stigma large, conical, angular, terminated above by two appendages longer than itself, which diverge below, meet near their apices, and again diverge”; which comes very near the stigma of Araujia. The plate of P. albens, however, represents these appendages as converging without meeting.²

In my letter of 16th March I spoke of the Araujia as belonging to the Apocyneæ. I ought to have said the Asclepiadaceæ. I was misled by the statement of Brotero, that the plant belonged “to the Apocyneæ of Jussieu,” and forgot that his Apocyneæ are not co-extensive with those of later writers.³ My error seems the greater on looking again at the sketch I made, for on it I find the natural order correctly noted.

There is another mistake (proceeding from imperfect recollection) which I wish to correct. I represented Knapp as having said that the Apocynum, in catching flies, acts by the stigma; whereas, according to him, it operates by means of the stamens. His language upon this point is perfectly clear: he says that when a fly alights on the flower, “the filaments close”, and detain it until it is dead; “the filaments then relax, and the body falls to the ground”. One of his figures represents “two expanded anthers ready for capture”, and another the “anthers closed” over the pistil, “and the prey captured”.⁴ My mistake arose, I think, in this way: I had a pretty distinct recollection of the two expanded anthers in his figure (the other three having been removed) though not of the pistil, and had completely forgotten all the portions of the description above quoted. Under these circumstances, recollecting the binary structure of the fruit, my memory had transformed the two stamens into two stigmas.

I have to ask your indulgence for these errors, as I wrote almost entirely from memory, and could not at the moment consult the books which I have since seen, and which I was then desirous of referring to. The “Journal of a Naturalist”⁵ I had certainly not seen for more than twelve years. I have lately seen several old and modern notices of the fly-destroying habits of the Apocynum; but the accounts of the modus operandi of capture seem to be very conflicting.⁶ I also enclose a small packet of seed of the Drosophyllum lusitanicum, Link, (Drosera lusitanica Linn) an insect-capturing, and in all probability, like its English allies, an insect-digesting plant. The seeds were sent by my botanical friend along with those which I undertook to procure for you; and he informs me that “it seems to prefer peat in quartzy alluvion, the sand being often like pebbles”. I hope this may be interesting to you in connection with your present researches.⁷

I remain, | Dear Sir, | Yours faithfully, | Edwin J. Johnston Jr.