Compilation
Stapelia hirsuta

S. hirsuta is the second species of the tribe Stapeliæ discovered in South Africa, apparently towards the end of the 17th century. Like S. variegata, it varies considerably in its flowers, the principal varieties being enumerated, but other forms in cultivation raised from seeds produced by insect agency in Europe do not quite correspond to any of the above and are certainly hybrids between forms of S. hirsuta or between it and some other species. Var. unguipetala I now believe to be one of these, as no wild example is known. The specimen labelled S. hirsuta in the Linnean Herbarium consists of a single flower of the var. patula, from which the corona has been removed. This, however, is not the form described by Linnæus in his Hortus Cliffortianus and preserved in the Hortus Cliffortianus Herbarium (now at the British Museum), and as that was evidently the form commonly cultivated (since all the other specimens I have seen bearing date between 1727 and 1800 belong to it), I have taken the Hortus Cliffortianus specimen as the type. This form seems to have disappeared from cultivation, and I have never seen a living cultivated example of it. Thunberg states that S. hirsuta grows “on mountains near Cape Town, near Paarl and elsewhere,” but as I have shown in the Journal of the Linnean Society, xvii. 166, his Herbarium contains 3 unlocalised forms under that name, one of which is probably typical S. hirsuta, one the variety affinis, and the other I think is a distinct and at present otherwise unknown species. So far as known to me no form of this species is now found on the mountains near Cape Town. Commelin's figure (a good one for that period) quoted by Linnæus represents the form of var. patula in which the dorsal wing of the inner corona-lobes is entirely adnate to the inner horn, but this appears to be an unstable character. The type specimen of S. lanifera, Haw. (a single flower), at Oxford, is very instructive as to variability of the inner corona lobes; three have the dorsal wing adnate for all its length to the inner horn, one free for 3/4 and the fifth quite free to the base, thus combining the characters of the type and var. affinis. The var. lutea is a curious and distinct form, discovered in April, 1906, by Mr. C. Piers, who only found a single plant, growing amongst var. affinis, of which it is evidently a seedling form. The variety grata may perhaps be only a slight form of typical S. hirsuta, but the corona more nearly resembles var. patula. Of S. villosa I have only seen one flower preserved in alcohol, which I cannot now distinguish from typical S. hirsuta, and suspect that the locality “Little Namaqualand” may be an error.