NOTES ON THE BOTANY OF JAMAICA. 283 
cotton-trees, after the trunk is grown near the base to a certain normal 
diameter, it does not seem to increase it at all. You see trees thirty 
feet high, with just as large a stem as those that are eighty feet. The 
height is generally easily measured, by pulling down the long roots 
and runners of wild figs, Cissi, and Convoleuli with which they are 
festooned, and stretching them between the hands. I find the usual 
height up to the boughs to be about nine stretches of five feet two, or 
about forty-five to fifty feet, but some are a great deal higher. It is 
lamentable to see a noble tree, when it has thus reached its greatest 
glory, fall an easy prey to a parasitic fig. A lady living a few miles 
off tells me, that when she was a child there was a lofty and beautiful 
tree of this kind near her father’s house: she went to England, and 
returned about thirty years after, and there was then no vestige of the 
cotton-tree there, but a very handsome full-grown fig-tree in its place. 
A small plant of fig establishes itself in a rent or fork of the cotton- 
tree, and throws down a root to the ground, which becomes stretched 
as taut as a violoncello string, and carries up nutriment to the little 
parent plant above, which drops stronger and larger and more numerous 
roots till it has enveloped the cotton-tree and choked it; and insects 
do the rest. 
The Fig is considered the most useless tree in Jamaica. The bark 
makes a very good cordage, but there are others, the Trumpet-tree 
(Cecropia peltata), the Burn-nose (Daphne tinifolia), that yield a better ; 
and by universal consent it is looked upon as the embodied principle 
of evil, and compared to a Scotch attorney strangling a Creole 
proprietor. 
The bark of the two trees alluded to might become a great article 
of commerce. The Cecropia is the common weed that springs up after 
clearing forest-ground, it grows rapidly, and might be reared in any 
quantity upon land that has been exhausted by provision-crops. A 
person equally acquainted with the vegetation of the West Indies, 
might write as excellent a work upon the resources of these islands as 
Royle’s upon the Resources of India; but such is at present the de- 
spondency and the want of capital here, that the inhabitants will not 
risk anything even in turning to account what they actually possess; and 
ship-cargoes of oranges are allowed to fall and rot upon the ground, 
while they fetch twopence a piece at Philadelphia and New York. 
There is a small tree so common about Moneague as to bear the 
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