76 Mr. E. C. Taylor on the Birds of the West Indies. 



succeeded in doing so, — had he only gone to Trinidad and 

 seen the silk-cotton trees which I saw there, he must, I am 

 sure, have been satisfied. In Venezuela this tree is called 

 Ceiba. In Martinique it goes by the name oiFromagier, though 

 what connexion with cheese it is supposed to have I cannot 

 imagine. 



I am inclined to believe that, owing to its warm moist climate 

 and its rich soil, Trinidad is equal to any part of the world in 

 rankness and luxuriance of vegetation. It especially abounds in 

 palms, of which more than twenty species are found in the 

 island. 



I was by no means idle while in Trinidad, and I think I ma- 

 naged, in the course of my many excursions, to see the greater 

 part of the island. A steamboat runs daily from Port of Spain 

 to the town of San Fernando, which is situated about thirty 

 miles to the south, on the Gulf of Paria. Twice a week this 

 same steamboat continues its course beyond San Fernando to 

 La Brea and Cedros. Shortly after my arrival I went by this 

 steamboat to La Brea to visit the celebrated pitch-lake, which 

 lies about two miles inland from that place. The lake, which 

 is surrounded with dense bush, is irregularly circular, about half 

 a mile in diameter, and has in it two or three small islands co- 

 vered with trees. In the centre of the lake the pitch is soft, 

 and seems to bubble up ; at the sides it is quite hard and much 

 crevassed, the crevasses being filled with water. Except for the 

 said crevasses, it would have been very like the asphalt of the 

 Paris boulevards; and this, I may remark, was the only thing I saw 

 in the West Indies that at all reminded me of Paris. Travelling 

 on horseback is, of course, the only way of getting about in the 

 interior of the island, and even that is a matter of some diffi- 

 culty owing to the excessive density of the forest. The longest 

 expedition I made in Trinidad was to ride in two days right 

 across the island to the east coast, or " Bande del Est" as it is 

 called, where T remained a week. The east coast, which is ex- 

 posed to the open Atlantic, is very different in its features from 

 the shores of the Gulf of Paria. It presents towards the ocean 

 a shore of beautiful hard sand, fringed for a length of more than 

 twenty-five miles with a natural growth of cocoa-nut trees {Cocos 



