PUDDING OF ECONOMIC PLANTS. 339 



required. It bears pruning and clipping with impunity. Its 

 fruit is a small, black berry, produced in bundles ; the juice is 

 said to be used for painting playing-cards and also for colouring 

 port wine. A bitter extract called Ligustrine is obtained from 

 the bark; it also contains tannin. 



Protea, the Linnoean name of a genus, the type of the 

 Protea family (Proteacese). It consists of 40 to 50 species of 

 shrubs and smaU trees, with alternate, entire, smooth or villose 

 leaves, varying from linear to oblong, elHptical, and cordate. 

 Flowers in terminal heads, composed of numerous tubular florets 

 (calyx), surrounded by oblong imbricated bracts, similar to the 

 flowers of the Composite family (Composite), in F. longiflora, 

 F. grandiflora, F. S2Jeciosa, F. formosa, and F. mellifera. The 

 flowers are large, 3 to 4 inches in length, firm and imbricated, 

 forming a cup, which in F. mellifera contams a large quantity 

 of honey. {See Honey Flowers.) They are all, with the excep- 

 tion of F. abyssinica, natives of South Africa. Twenty-three 

 species are recorded in the second edition of Hortus Kewensis 

 (1813), which for many years formed a part of the great collec- 

 tion of Proteacese at Kew. 



Prune. {See Plum.) 



Puchurim Bean. {See Nutmeg.) 



Pudding Berries {Comus caimclensis), a herb of the Dog- 

 wood family (Cornacete), common throughout tlie whole of North 

 America. An allied species is C. suecica, called Dwarf Cornel. 

 It is smaller than the preceding, seldom exceeding 6 inches in 

 heio'ht. It is a native of the North of Scotland and the North 

 of Europe generally. The berries of both are used as food, 

 especially by the Esquimaux. 



Pudding Pipe, a name given in Jamaica and the West 

 Indies to Cassia fistula, sometimes called Catliartocarims fistula, 

 2l small wing-leaved tree of the Bean family (Leguminosiv), 

 producing abundance of yellow flowers, native of the East 

 Indies, and now common in most tropical countries. It 

 produces a smooth cylindrical pod twice the tliickness of the 

 finger, and sometimes two feet in length. The interior is divided 



