570 PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM. vol.59. 



Entada scandens is probably the best known tropical plant dis- 

 tributed by ocean currents, since its large, lenticular, dark kidney 

 colored seeds have been for ages cast up by the waves on the eastern 

 shores of the Atlantic from the Azores northward to Nova Zembla. 

 These seafaring qualities and vitality are remarkable, as is the dis- 

 tribution of the parent plant, since it is found in all of the Tropics and 

 yet presents certain apparent anomalies. It is normally a climber of 

 immense proportions with truly gigantic pods, and belongs to a 

 genus with some 15 existing species, about half of which are African. 

 There are three or four in the American Tropics, one or two in the 

 southeastern Asiatic region, and one in Madagascar. Most of these 

 are not strand plants, and although Entada scandens also grows in 

 inland situations, it is as a strand plant that it is principally known, 

 since it frequents mangrove associations and the jungle immediately 

 behind tropical beaches. 



The fossil is so much like the existing sea bean that one is justified 

 in assuming that it, like the descedant, was distributed by ocean 



FlG. 4.— 1. ENTADA SCANDENS (LINNAEUS) KUNTZE. OUTLINE OF A SEED FROM JAMAICA. 2. E. BOWENI 

 BERRY, MESA PABLO. 3. E. SCANDENS. OUTLINE OF A SEED FROM CUBA. ONE-HALF NATURAL SIZE. 



currents, and its occurrence in a clay lens in what appears to have 

 been a rather widespread marine series of deposits, adds some prob- 

 ability to this conjecture; and as its horizon antedates the last seaway 

 across the Isthmus of Panama, it is not difficult to account for the 

 presence of the modern species on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides 

 of South America. 



Entada has not certainly been found fossil heretofore except in the 

 case of the subfossil seeds of the existing sea bean buried in the coastal 

 deposits of Scandinavia, where they had been carried from the Antilles 

 by the Gulf Stream. Unger long ago described two different species 

 of fossil pods which he referred to the genus Entada. These were 

 Entada primogenita 18 from the Miocene of Radoboj in Croatia and 

 Entada polypJiemi 19 from the Oligocene of Sotzka in Styria. They 

 are both large pods, although not so large as the Venezuelan fossil 

 or the existing sea bean. The second is rather suggestive of Entada, 



» Unger, F., Sylloge, vol. 2, p. 36, pi. 11, fig. 22, 1862. 

 is Idem., fig. 23. 



