XLIII. KŒBERLINIACEÆ.
An intricately branched almost leafless tree or shrub, with thin red-brown scaly bark, stout alternate glabrous branchlets covered with pale green bark and terminating in a sharp rigid straight or slightly curved spine. Leaves minute, early deciduous, alternate, narrow-obovate, rounded at apex. Flowers perfect, on slender club-shaped puberulous pedicels from the axils of minute scarious deciduous bracts, in short umbel-like racemes below the end of the branches; calyx of 3 or 5 minute sepals imbricated in the bud, deciduous; petals 4, convolute in the bud, hypogynous, obovate or oblong, subunguiculate, white, much longer than the sepals; disk 0; stamens 8, free, hypogynous, as long as the petals; filaments thickened in the middle, subulate at the ends; anthers oval, attached on the back near the base, 2-celled, the cells opening longitudinally; ovary ovoid, 2-celled, contracted at base into a short stalk and above into a simple subulate style; stigma terminal, obtuse, slightly emarginate; ovules numerous, adnate in several series to the fleshy placenta, horizontal or dependent, anatropous. Fruit a 2-celled berry, black at maturity, subglobose, tipped with the remnants of the pointed style; flesh thin and succulent, the cells 1 or 2-seeded by abortion. Seed vertical, circinate-cochleate; seed-coat crustaceous, slightly rugose, striate; albumen thin; embryo annular; cotyledons semiterete; the radicle ascending.
The family is represented by a single genus.