ROSACEA. 
SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 5 
bark, leaves, and roots are astringent, and have been employed in tropical America in the treatment of 
diarrhoea, leucorrhcea, and hemorrhages.’ 
The earliest mention? of Chrysobalanus Icaco as an inhabitant of Florida appears in A Concise 
Natural History of East and West Florida, written by the distinguished engineer Bernard Romans,’ 
and published in New York in 1775. 
Chrysobalanus Icaco was introduced into the Physic Garden at Chelsea in England by Philip 
Miller * in 1752, and is occasionally cultivated in tropical regions of the Old World.’ 
Icaco, the specific name, is probably of Carib origin.’ 
1 Tussac, Fl. Antill. iv. 92.— Endlicher, Enchirid. Bot. 665.— 
Treasury of Botany, i. 278.— Martius, Fl. Brasil. xiv. pt. ii. 75.— 
Baillon, Hist. Pl. i. 459. 
2 « A few spots of hammock, or upland, are found on this island ; 
these produce the itri-folio, Coecoloba, Mastic, 
Borassus, and a few trees of the live oak and willow oak, the Chry- 
sobalanus, & the Cereus Triangularis, and with these that kind of 
Cactus commonly called Opuntia,’’ 283. 
i) 
ficus 
8 Bernard Romans, a native of Holland, received in England the 
education of an engineer, and was afterwards employed by the 
English government as a surveyor in the southern colonies of 
North America. He appears to have lived from 1763 to 1771 in 
Florida, where he paid some attention to natural history, enjoying 
a salary of fifty pounds a year as King’s Botanist. During his 
residence in New York Romans became imbued with the revolu- 
tionary spirit and was engaged by the Committee of Safety to pre- 
pare a scheme for the defense of the Highlands ; but his relations 
with the ittee were tisf 
y, his plans were not adopted, 
and he was relieved from duty. In 1776 he was commissioned 
captain of a company of Pennsylvania artillery. Charges of mis- 
conduct were soon preferred against him, but he was probably 
acquitted, as not long afterwards he was deputed by General Gage 
to inspect the works at Fort Ann and Skenesborough, and in 1780 
was ordered to South Carolina to join the Southern Army. Ro- 
mans sailed from New Haven or New London in a vessel which 
was captured by the British and taken to Jamaica, where he was 
held as a prisoner until the end of the war in 1783, when he was 
put on board of a ship bound for the United States. He died on 
the voyage, his friends believed a violent death (see Munsell’s 
Historic Series, No. 5, Obstructions to the Navigation of Hudson’s 
River, by E. M. Ruttenber, Introduction, 9). In addition to the 
work on Florida, of which only the first volume appeared, and which 
is now an extremely rare book, as the largest part of the edition 
was destroyed by fire in New York, Romans, who was a member 
of the American Philosophical Society, printed in 1778, in its Trans- 
actions, a paper on The Marine Compass; in 1775 he published 
A Map of the Civil War in America ; in 1778, at Hartford, Connec- 
ticut, the first volume of his Annals of the Troubles in the Nether- 
lands, the second volume of which appeared four years later, and 
in 1779, with J. G. W. de Braham, A Complete Pilot for the Gulf 
Passage. The History of East and West Florida is a work of no 
little interest to botanists, as Romans was the first person with any 
knowledge of plants who visited the coasts and islands of southern 
Florida ; it gives the earliest account of the Ogeechee Lime, and 
of the Florida Fig, Ficus aurea, and first makes known the fact 
that several West India trees are found on the Florida coast. 
4 See i. 38. 
5 Aiton, Hort. Kew. ii. 166. 
® Voigt, Hort. Sub. Calcutt. 265.— Hooker f£. Fl. Brit. Ind. ii. 
307. — Naudin, Manuel de l Acclimateur, 204. 
7 Hicacos was first used by Oviedo y Valdes (Hist. Nat. Gen. Ind. 
lib. viii. cap. 9), who landed in San Domingo in 1514, to describe the 
fruit of this plant, which has given its name to numerous capes and 
points of land on the coast of the West Indies and Central America. 
