Notes on Xanthostemon F. Mueller and Kjellbergiodendron Burret.
Year: 1952
Type: article
Abstract: THE GENUS Xanthostemon F. Mueller was published in Germany in 1940 and did not become available to us until about a decade later.My interest in this work is not so much in the New Caledonian species considered, which form the bulk of the described forms, and the few Australian ones, but rather in his treatment of certain Philippine, eastern Malaysian, and Papuasian species.He recognized forty-three species and a few subspecies and varieties, distributed into five newly proposed sections, Vesicaria, Brevistyla, Cylindrica, Bullata, and Campanulata, the latter subdivided into two subsections, Multiflora and Pauciflora.I do not criticize these minor categories.Like other revisions of its type it has the merit of a proposed system of classification, and of bringing together the widely scattered published data regarding all the species described up to 1940.One judges that perhaps certain obvious errors in nomenclature may be due perhaps more to a lack of critical editorial work on the manuscript than as wholly chargeable to a beginner who was working with a peculiarly difficult group of plants.In nomenclature the author was apparently misled by Pampanini's erroneous interpretation of the rules of nomenclature governing the validity of certain published binomials in 1905.The several cases are discussed under Xanthostemon speciosum Merr., X. pubescens C. T. White, XY. multiflorum (Montr.)Beauvisage, and X. gugerli: Merr.Xanthostemon is a genus of considerable significance from the standpoint of phytogeography.Its great center of diversification is New Caledonia, with a total of about thirty-three endemic species.Five species are recorded from northern and northeastern Australia, three from New Guinea, four from the Philippines, and one from Celebes (this Celebesian form also extending to Moena, Ternate and Batjan).To date no representative of the genus has been reported from any part of the Sunda or Lesser Sunda Islands, the latter group extending eastward from Java.Incidentally Gugerli's distribution map extends the range of the genus, within the Philippines, to northern Luzon, about 250 miles beyond the known actual range of the Philippine representatives.One problem, not solved by Dr. Gugerli, as he did not have access to certain historical material, was the status of Xanthostemon celebicum Koord.He merely quoted the original distinctly unsatisfactory
Source: Journal of the Arnold Arboretum
DOI: 10.5962/p.333938
Author: Elmer D. Merrill
Language: English
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4256420057