282 NOTES ON THE BOTANY OF JAMAICA. 
flower when I arrived in December, and is in flower now, in May. It 
is become as common as almost any indigenous tree. 
The most conspicuous object in the landscape of this district is un- 
questionably the Cotton-tree, Eriodendron anfractuosum, DC., the growth 
of which is so singularly different from that of most dicotyledonous 
trees, that I am surprised to have never met with any description of 
it. Its outward form has been often enough described and pictured ; 
—a lofty smooth columnar trunk, swollen in the middle, supported 
1 below by vast buttresses, and crowned at the top, some fifty or sixty 
feet from the ground, with a magnificent canopy of spreading 
branches. But the mode by which it attains this height is, as far as 
I am aware, unknown. All the timber-merchants and old residents 
agree in two points, —that the middle, the innermost part of the trunk, 
is so soft and spongy as to yield to the axe without being severed 
by it, and the outside a wood hard enough to be used for barrel-heads 
and shingles; and, secondly, that the great spreading branches at the 
top are the same that it, once bore a few feet from the ground. If the 
wind tears off a bough, it is not replaced. I have seen several denuded 
trunks standing in the fields like great stone columns. There is no 
sign of anything like a leading-shoot, and successive whorls of boughs, 
as in other trees with long shafts. The Rev. G. Handford showed 
me, upon one of them near his house, the initials of several names 
that were inscribed upon the bark breast-high four years ago, and they 
are now much above my reach, fully four feet at least above the original 
level, and not in the slightest degree distorted. There is an iron spike 
close to these names, the head of which, though driven close into the 
tree, is not yet buried. Most people whom I ask have never thought on 
the subject, but Mr. Braham, to whom I am indebted, among other 
attentions, for that great botanical rarity, a branch of bamboo in 
blossom, which he procured me from a distant part of the island, has 
long been aware of the peculiarity of its growth, and, unable to explain 
it, has promised, as soon as the crop of cotton-wool is gathered, to 
have a tree cut down for examination. My impression is that the 
enormous buttresses lift the tree bodily many feet from the ground, 
. and that it is by that process that Mr. Handford’s tree is rising up 50 
fast, names and all, and that the rest of the growth is effected at the 
bulging part, by some process analogous to that (whatever it may be) | 
: by. which the Baobab attains its enormous dimensions. In these 
