The genus Mussaendopsis Bail. (Rub.)

The genus Mussaendopsis was created by Baillon in 1879 for a tree found by Beccari 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 Scort. was founded. The descriptions of the two genera are very similar, and as Mussaendopsis Baill. is not mentioned by Scortechini, we may safely assume that Baillon’s publication was unknown to him. The identity of the two genera was disclosed by K. Schumann in his monograph of the family in Engler & Prantl. Subsequently the plant was dealt with by Stapf, King and Gamble, Ridley and Lemée. None of the descriptions, however, is entirely satisfactory, and this applies also to the figure given by Stapf in Hooker’s Icones Plantarum: 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 Baillon they were described as interpetiolar; the other authors are silent on this point. Baillon, however, was mistaken: they 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, led to an entirely different result: of all these genera Capirona proved to be the only one in which they really occur. Mussaendopsis, therefore, is the third genus in which this kind of stipules has been observed.