§p. [ 2461 ]
L I C H EN melaleucus.
Brownish Covered Lichen.
CRYPTOGAMIA Alga.
Gen. Char. Male, scattered warts.
Female, smooth shields or tubercles, in which the
seeds are imbedded.
Spec. Char. Crustaceous, cream-coloured, with scattered,
rather convex, warts, opening by an irregular
indexed orifice. Shields immersed, depressed,
brown, with a thin, obsolete, jagged border,
of their own substance.
Syn. Thelotrema melaleucum. Turn, and Borr. Mss.
F o u n d on the bark of young oaks, in St. Leonard’s forest,
Sussex, by Mr. W. Borrer, who proposes to publish it, under
the synonym we have cited, in the Lickenographia Britannica.
We retain the specific name, in reducing the plant to Lichen;
because the former L. melaleucus, Ach. Prod. 15, is a nonentity,
or rather not distinct from gemmatus, Hid. 17, as Dr. Acharius
has been so good as to inform us by letter.
The present is most akin to our inclusus, t. 678, but sufficiently
different. Its crust makes irregularly elliptical, cream-
coloured, thin patches on the smooth bark, an inch or two over,
of a filmy, scarcely tartareous, substance, smooth and rather
polished, not bordered, but gradually thinner and fainter at the
edge. Numerous, rather tumid, ‘ warts are scattered over the
surface, in each of which is deeply lodged a brown depressed
shield, or disk, with a thin, irregular, indexed, often obsolete,
border, of its own hue and substance, encompassed with the
irregular orifice of the wart, though not always united therewith.