MORINDA CITRIFOLIA. ' 219 



nut, orange, guava, plantain, and other tropical 

 fruit-trees ; and the beach was strewed with the 

 plants and bell-shaped purplish flowers of the 

 Ipomcea soladenella, or sea-side convolvulus, 

 which grew in very great profusion. 



The Morinda citrifolia was here abundant, 

 as also among the islands forming the eastern 

 Archipelago, where it is used as props for the 

 pepper-vines, or planted as a shade for the 

 coffee-plants, and is named by the natives 

 Mangkudu.* The roots of this species are only 

 mentioned as being used as a dyeing material 

 in the eastern Archipelago. The Morinda is 

 indigenous also to the Philippine Islands, where 

 it is named in the Tagalo Tambungaso. The 

 natives of these islands, when a limb is frac- 

 tured, use the leaves of this shrub, anointed 

 with oil, to lay over the surface of the fractured 

 limb ; and it is considered by them of benefit in 

 allaying the inflammatory action. 



This shrub attains the height of ten or twelve 

 feet. At Tahiti, and most of the Polynesian 

 Islands, where it is also found indigenous, the 



* In the language of the western countries of the Archi- 

 pelago, the tree is named according to the idiom of the pro- 

 nimciation of the people, Mangkudu, Bangkudu, or Wang- 

 kudu ; the three initial consonants in these cases being com- 

 mutable and very arbitrarily used," — Crawford's hulian 

 Archipelago. 



