A NATURALIST'S EXCURSION IN DOMINICA. 681 



young leaf, but soon become wholly separated and acquire an independ- 

 ent existence, to become in turn parents of a new brood. Some other 

 plants multiply by offsets from the leaves, but the exhibition of a dif- 

 ferentiated propagation-leaf is peculiar to this one. Among the trees 

 that attract our attention is the shore-grape ( Coccoloha uvifera), with 

 its curious knotted and bushy growth, and its thick, hard leaves, which 

 is found nowhere but in the Antilles. It offers an odd combination of 

 the creeping and upright growths : in the isolated specimens, the 

 lower limbs bend down and run along the pebbly beach, but without 

 taking root ; while the upper limbs spread themselves out in the air, at 

 this time hung with whitish flower-spikes, which are later to develop 

 into the dark-blue "grapes of the shore." On the beach a few miles 

 north of Roseau are some plants of the manchineel-tree {Hippomane 

 mancinella), now becoming quite rare, which is fabled to be deadly 

 to all who sleep under it. The thing that is true about this myth is, 

 that the sap contains an acrid poison that causes painful sores on the 

 skin. The botanist Jacquin, who visited the Antilles in the middle of 

 the last century, says that no animal would touch the fruit of the man- 

 chineel, though the ground under the trees was covered with it and 

 inhabited by innumerable crabs. Jacquin denies that there is any 

 danger in sleeping under the trees, because he and his companions 

 rested under one of them for three hours without feeling any incon- 

 venience from it. In his time, manchineel-wood was used for fine 

 cabinet-work, and was obtained without risk from poisoning by build- 

 ing a fire around the tree, by which the greater part of the sap was 

 boiled out, and then cutting it down very carefully with the face veiled. 

 The Capparis cynophallophora attracts notice by its curiously shaped 

 flowers, conspicuous through their numerous long, cream-colored fila- 

 ments which, drooping when they fii'st come from the buds, gradually 

 erect themselves into an umbel of elastic threads. They are visited by 

 hosts of insects, which, striking against the stamens in their efforts to 

 reach the nectaries, set them into rapid motion and become dusted 

 with the pollen, and are thus constituted bearers of it to other flowers ; 

 for the Capparis is proteranderous, and only the pistils 'of flowers that 

 have already cast their pollen are capable of being fertilized. Con- 

 spicuous objects are the papilionaceous flowers of the Erythrina co- 

 rallodendron, which, the tree being leafless at this season, reveal 

 themselves to a vessel approaching the coast in bunches of gorgeous 

 scarlet. 



If we continue our excursion till sunset, we are overtaken in return- 

 ing to the town by the sudden coming on of darkness, for the twilight 

 is very short in this low latitude. But, hardly has the departed sun 

 ceased to gild the crowns of the cocoa-palms, than the moon sheds her 

 soft light through the delicately feathered foliage of the tamarind- 

 trees under which we are walking. With every succeeding minute the 

 crowns of these trees grow more transparent and open ; for the leaves 



