tion is incomplete and the figures of the parts of the flower inaccurate, there can be no question about the tree intended. It was described from specimens collected in New Zealand on Cook's second voyage (1772-75), and the perfect fruit seems to have been unknown to the Forsters or they would hardly have given it a name signifying club-fruit. They were evidently unaware, too, that the fruit of Corynocarpus is edible, or it would have been included in G. Forster's ‘De Plantis Esculentis Insularum Oceani Australis.’ But Sir Joseph Banks and Dr. Solander, who were the botanists on Cook's first voyage (1768-71), also brought specimens of this tree to England, and it was described and figured by them under the name of Merretia lucida (in memory of Christopher Merrett, M.D., author of ‘Pinax rerum naturalium Britannicarum,’ 1661). The authorities of the Botanical Department of the British Museum have obligingly furnished me with a copy of the description, which is very full, and accurate in most of the details. The most important point in which it differs from what I have observed and what other authors have described or figured is the shape of the petaloid staminodes. They describe them as ‘apice tricuspidata, cuspide intermedio duplo maiore.’ The staminodes of C. similis and G. dissimilis are acutely toothed at the apex, whilst those of G. lævigata are irregularly and minutely toothed from about the middle upwards and around the top. There can be no doubt about Banks and Solander's specimen having been brought from New Zealand, because exact localities are given, and because Cook did not visit the New Hebrides on his first voyage. On the second voyage he touched at several of the islands; but the Forsters record their Corynocarpus from New Zealand, and their figures and description of the staminodes convey no information whatever beyond the presence of such bodies in the flower. Banks and Solander also describe a fully developed fruit in the following terms: ‘Drupa oblongo-ovalis, glaberrima, lutea, magnitudine Olivæ Hispanicæ (1 ⅓ unc.), substantia carnosa, lutea sesquilineam crassa edulis.’ They further describe the ‘nucleus’ (seed) as ‘amarissimus.’ … In 1823 or 1824 it appears to have been introduced into English gardens.… A. Cunningham, in 1840 (‘Floræ Insularum Novæ-Zelandiæ Precursor,’ in Ann. of Nat. History, iv., p. 260), gives a Latin description of all the parts except the fruit, and cites Banks and Solander's manuscript name. He is also the first, so far as I am aware, to explain the process by which the Maoris got rid of the poisonous properties of the seeds and rendered them edible.” With regard to the first notice of karaka-berries as food, Polack gives the name kou as “the steamed kernels of the native fruit karaka.” His work was published in London in 1840.