CoLENso. — 0)1 Two Peculiar South American Plants. 327 



too as valuable forage-plants for both sheep and large cattle. 

 And this use (as I take it) will be the more interesting to our 

 sheep- and cattle-breeders here in Hawke's Bay and elsewhere 

 when it is remembered by them what a pi'odigious outcry was 

 raised some twenty-five years ago when the large and common 

 thistle (Cnicus sp.), then lately introduced, was becoming ex- 

 ceedingly plentiful, causing some of our early settlers to view 

 its rapidly overrunning the country with dismay, fearing the 

 certain starvation of their flocks and herds. Our Provincial 

 Council (of which I was a member) was literally besieged with 

 urgent applications to pass immediate stringent laws for the 

 suppression of "vicious thistles "; but, fortunately for Hawke's 

 Bay, the majority in the said Provincial Council, after much 

 debating, determined not to do so. And afterwards, in not a 

 few instances, in times of drought, those very doomed and 

 maligned thistles saved their flocks. All Provincial Councils 

 in the colony, how^ever, did not act so prudently, and there- 

 fore much of bitterness and grief and lawsuits, and consequent 

 " costs," followed. In many places where the thistles once 

 completely covered the ground there is not one now to be 

 seen. 



This plant (the Opuntia) existed both wild and cultivated 

 in Mexico before the arrival of the Spaniards (a.d. 1518). 

 Fernandez described nine varieties of it, which shows the 

 antiquity of its cultivation. The famous cochineal insect feeds 

 on one of them especially, and it has been transported with 

 the plant to the Canary Islands and elsewhere. It was one 

 of the first plants which the Spaniards introduced to the Old 

 World, both in Europe and Asia ; and the plant soon became 

 naturalised in the South of Europe and in Africa. In Spain it 

 bore its American name of tuna ; while the Moors, who took it 

 into Barbary -when they were expelled from the peninsula, 

 called it "fig of the Christians." The custom of using the 

 plant for living fences, '-^ and the nourishing property of the 

 fruits, which contain a large proportion of sugar, have deter- 

 mined its extension round the Mediterannean. The fruit is 

 very similar in its properties to that of currants, in some being 

 refreshing and agreeable to the taste, in others mucilaginous 

 and insipid. Many are valued as palliatives of intermittent 

 and bilious fevers, in consequence of their refreshing sub-acid 

 juice. The fruit of 0. tuna is of the richest carmine, and 

 forms a valuable pigment, employed at Naples as a water- 

 colour. 



* Of Opuntia tuna it is recorded : " This kind of Indian fig makes 

 strong living fences. Wlien tlie Island of St. Christopher (West Indies) 

 was to be divided between the English and the French three rows of 

 the tuna were planted by common consent between the boundaries." — 

 {Sloane.) 



