carpel bears a stylulus and these are well separated at the apex of the ovary. The fruit is one-seeded; a capsule in Medusandra and Soyauxia; a drupe in Peridiscus and Whittonia. History George Bentham established the genus Peridiscus in 1862, naming its only species Peridiscus lucidus. He placed it in a group which he called "Tribus Flacourtieae" and which later would be known as the family Flacourtiaceae. Bentham wrote no etymology for this name, but it is generally believed that the name refers to the fact that the stamens are attached along the outer edge of the nectary disk. Daniel Oliver established the genus Soyauxia in 1880 for Soyauxia gabonensis, placing it in the family Passifloraceae. He named it for the German botanist and plant collector Hermann Soyaux, saying "Mons. Soyaux, now settled in the Gaboon, well deserves that his name should be associated with one of his interesting discoveries in that region". The family Flacourtiaceae was, as Hermann Sleumer said, a fiction, and Peridiscus was, from the outset, one of its most doubtful members. Recognizing its distinctiveness, João Kuhlmann segregated it into its own family in 1947. In 1952, John Brenan named and described Medusandra, erecting a new family, Medusandraceae to accommodate it. In 1953, Brenan transferred Soyauxia from Passifloraceae to Medusandraceae, but few others agreed with his classification. In 1954, John Hutchinson and John McEwen Dalziel followed Brenan's treatment in the second edition of their Flora of West Tropical Africa. Hutchinson, however, soon recanted, explaining in some detail why he thought that Medusandra and Soyauxia were not related. In 1962, Noel Y. Sandwith named and described Whittonia. In an accompanying article, Charles Russell Metcalfe discussed its close relationship to Peridiscus. For four decades thereafter, Peridiscaceae was viewed as a family of uncertain taxonomic position, containing two genera. In the year 2000, a DNA sequence for the rbcL gene of Whittonia was produced and used in a molecular phylogenetic study of the eudicots. This study placed Peridiscaceae in a clade with Elatinaceae and Malpighiaceae, a very surprising and unexpected result. On the basis of this phylogeny, the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group placed Peridiscaceae in Malpighiales when they published the APG II system of plant classification in 2003. It was soon found that the rbcL sequence for Whittonia was a chimera, formed by DNA from unidentified plants that had contaminated the sample. No subsequent attempt to extract DNA from Whittonia has