Szekessy Vilmos (szerk.): A Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum évkönyve 59. (Budapest 1967)
Radics, F.: A revision of the Nymphaea material in Hungarian Natural History Museum
outernmost petals are longer than the sepals (alba feature), but the stamens are about two-thirds shorter than the outernmost petals (candida feature). It is a definitely Candida feature that the ovary is not set with stamens under the stigmatic disk. An explicite alba-trait is the reddish brown hue at the basis of the underside of the sepals, the rufous tinge of the underside of the petals, and the equal width of the innermost stamens and the anthers. However, the weak constriction of the stamens under the anthers speaks for N. tetragona GEORGI. The deep grooves of the carpels, the number of the carpellary styles and the still discernibly thicker and conical shape of the axile process are again aZ£>a-features, while the centrally deeply impressed funnel, the obtuse termination of the stigmatic rays of the pistillar filaments and the medially expanding carpellary styles (observed already by SIMONKAI!) are tetragona characteristics. The shape and dimensions of the fruit, the red hue of the maturing, and the dark olive tinge of the mature, seeds, as well as their dimensions and wrinkled arils testify —in our case —on N. alba (L.) PRESL. Finally, the coarser to finer granules of the heteromorphically spinose pollen, its green and occasionally yellowish colour, its dimensions (0.038 mm longer diameter, of which there occur greater and smaller measurements too), also refer to a threefold hybridization (N. albaXCandidaxtetragona). Despite this fact, they seem to be good, germinative pollen, and also largely uniform. Nor do they easily disrupt when swelling, a characteristic of primary or recent hybrids. The granulo-aculeate or verrucose exine of the alba and Candida pollen was already observed but also considered as unimportant by CASPARY (16; p. 625). On the other hand, SCHUSTER emphasized its essential and distinguishing character (I.e., p. 858); it was only KORSHINSKY who regarded the forms with mixed aculeate and verrucose pollen as hybrids (N. albaXCandida; I.e., p. 23). Owing to this hybrid character of the external morphological features, discernible also on the herbarial specimens, SIMONKAI cannot be blamed for having identified the waterlinies of the "Nymphaea-hrook." near Arad as a taxon relegable at one time to the alba-, at other times to the candida-type, and finally naming them, as was shown above, "ex maiore parte" Nymphaea venusta. It was only that he did not recognize their hybrid nature, nor could he help it, because the plants were wholly fertile — they could not have survived at all without well germinable and maturing seeds — and he had not found any one of the parent forms in their neighbourhood. In any way, by relegating them to a "new race" in the Nymphaea nomenclature of üastalia minoriflora (BORB.) SIMK. representing almost entirely the waterlilies of the Carpathian Basin, he recognized their geographic distinctness. Although TUZSON (17, p. 265) declared, in connection with N. alba L. f. Moeszii TUZSON (Rétyi-Nyír), the systematical value of SIMONKAI'S minoriflora and its distinctness to be "dubious", GRAEBNER (I.e., p. 529) acknowledged the systematical value of minoriflora, extending its geographic area. It is another question whether it was justified to assign the alba-, minoriflora-, and candida-type waterlilies, as races, to a single species {Gastalia speciosa SALISBURY). On the basis of our present knowledge (CASPARY, I.e., p. 62 ; SCHUSTER, I.e., p. 685 ; GRAEBNER, 1. c, p. 535), this cannot be definitely decided. The assumption of transitional forms had been discarded long ago, owing to the very antiquity of the genus Nymphaea (SCHUSTER, GRAEBNER), though GRAEBNER and ASCHERSON, in one of their earlier joint works (18, p. 320), had both contended this presumption. There is nothing left but to examine, on the basis of our herbarial data, the distinctness of SIMONKAI'S minoriflora. Of the minoriflora occurences in the Carpathian Basin, enumerated in SIMONKAI'S revision, I have studied, for the time being and with respect to the relevant literature, only the Nymphaea alba var. Candida BORB. specimens originating from Vésztő and the environs of the Rákos brook ; these exemplars are deposited in the Botanical Department of the Hungarian Natural History Museum (Plate II; Figs. 8 — 9).
