A TRIBE OF LEGUMINOSX. 5 
and great beauty, or climbers of various degree, from the shrub or 
small tree with weak sarmentose branches, to the tall liane, twi- 
ning up to the summits of the highest trees, or supporting them- 
selves by their twisted petioles or hooked spinous stipules. In 
Pterocarpus and its nearest allied small genera, Tipuana, Platypo- 
dium, Centrolobium, and Pecilanthe, in Platymiscium, and Hyme- 
nolobium, as well as in the Geoffroyee, all the species are arbores- 
cent. In the great genera Dalbergia, Macherium, Lonchocarpus, 
and Derris, as in the small genera technically distinguished from 
them, trees and climbers are irregularly mixed, and in some cases 
the same species is described as erect or scandent according to 
circumstances, whether growing isolated in an exposed dry situa- 
tion, or drawn up in a moist shady forest. This identity, however, 
of erect trees with climbers, of which we have vague notices 
supplied by collectors in tropical regions, in the case of various 
natural orders, has not yet been very satisfactorily made out, and 
requires further observation on the part of intelligent and expe- 
rienced botanists who may chance to be resident in hot countries, 
and can examine these trees in different stations and at different 
ages and periods of growth, uninfluenced by the prevalent and 
very natural ambition to raise to as high a figure as possible the 
numerical list of the new species they discover. 
The wood of the arborescent species, as in the case of most 
Leguminous trees, is always hard and durable, and often of great 
beauty, Many are considered of great value as timber-trees, and 
largely exported to Europe for furniture, as being elegantly veined 
and susceptible of a high polish. Of the principal varieties of 
Tosewood imported into this country, the two best, from Rio 
Janeiro (or rather from the interior through Rio Janeiro), are 
certainly supplied by species of Dalbergia, and chiefly by the D. 
nigra ; other qualities are derived from some species of Macherium. 
The Honduras and Martaban rosewoods appear also to be the pro- 
duce of some species of this tribe, and the tropical African rose- 
Wood or lancewood is certainly that of Pterocarpus erinaceus or P. 
echinatus. In Allemaó's enumeration of the best timber-trees of the 
forests around Rio Janeiro, no less than thirty-five out of ninety- 
nine are Leguminous, and among these, eleven are Dalbergieous, 
` chiefly Dalbergias and Macheriums, known to the merchants of the 
Country under the names of Jacarandas, Cabiunas, &c. Macherium 
Schomburgkii and others, Dipteryz, &c., in Guiana, Centrolobium 
m Venezuela, Piscidia erythrina in the West Indies, are among 
