436 A NATURALIST IN THE PACIFIC CHAP. 



Amongst other seeds and fruits brought down by the Fijian 

 rivers and stranded with a large amount of miscellaneous vegetable 

 debris on the beaches in the vicinity of the estuaries are the seeds 

 of Dioclea, Strongylodon lucidum, and Afzelia bijuga ; the empty 

 seeds of Musa Ensete (as identified with a query at Kew) ; the 

 empty stones of the Sea tree, apparently a species of Spondias ; 

 the seeds of Colubrina asiatica ; the fruits of an inedible indigenous 

 Orange (Citrus vulgaris ?) referred to in Chapter XIII ; the cocci of 

 Excsecaria Agallocha and Macaranga ; and Coco-nuts. 



The occurrence in Fijian beach-drift of the seeds of Musa Ensete, 

 or of a wild banana much like it, is very remarkable. This species 

 is found in the mountains of Abyssinia and on the slopes of 

 Kilima-njaro in Equatorial Africa ; but according to the mono- 

 graph by Schumann on the Musacese (Engler's Pflanzenreich, 1900) 

 the species is confined to Africa, whilst all the other species of the 

 subgenus are mostly restricted to the same continent with the 

 exception of one or two in Further India. The empty seeds are 

 frequent on the beach at Duniua at the mouth of the Ndreke-ni- 

 wai in Savu-savu Bay, Vanua Levu, and are doubtless brought 

 down by that river. Strangely enough the natives could give me 

 no information about the parent plant which I never discovered. 

 The seeds did not come under my notice in any other locality in 

 Fiji. They answer to the description and to the figure given by 

 Schumann for Musa Ensete ; and their presence in the drift is one 

 of the mysteries of the Pacific floras. 



To enumerate the seeds and fruits found stranded on beaches 

 in Fiji would be to give a list of all the littoral plants with buoyant 

 seeds or fruits that are included in the list given in Note 2. I may 

 here allude to the fact that the Coco-nut, whether brought down 

 by a river or transported by a current, is able to germinate and 

 establish itself when washed up on the Fijian beaches. I have 

 found these fruits germinating amongst the drift stranded on the 

 beaches near the mouths of rivers, some just beginning to germinate 

 and others already striking into the sand and showing the first 

 leaves. White residents living for years in one locality were quite 

 convinced that this frequently happens. One of them pointed out 

 to me some newly formed land at a river's mouth, not over two 

 years old, on which were growing young plants three or four feet 

 high of Barringtonia speciosa, Calophyllum Inophyllum,and several 

 other plants including young Coco-nut palms, all growing from 

 fruits washed up by the waves and therefore self-sown. 



Like the littoral flora the beach-drift proper to the Hawaiian 



