William Jackson Hooker

“ Professor Lindley mentions the plant to be annual, and only three or four inches high: in the greenhouse of the Botanical Garden of Glasgow its duration is more than annual, and it attains to about two feet. It is a very charming plant, no less deserving of cultivation for its beauty, than for the singular property of the column of stamens being endowed with a very active irritability, so that if touched with a pin on the out-side when curved, it bounds over to the opposite side of the flower and becomes inverted: this property is observable, in a greater or less degree, in the whole Genus. ”

“ Ovary inferior, or cohering with the tube of the calyx, narrow-linear, twice as long as the bractea, attenuated at each extremity, compressed, with a ridge along the upper side, two-celled, the lower or anterior cell bearing many ovules ”

“ Professor Lindley has pointed out the only difference between the cultivated plant and Mr. Brown's specific character; but this difference, which lies in the ovarium and fruit having only one perfect cell, is certainly neither acci- dental nor the effect of cultivation, as our figure of the ripe fruit, taken from a wild plant, will show. ”