52 ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND. 



they are to reach comparatively virgin soil, unexhausted 

 by the deep-set roots of the mother trunk. Under such 

 exceptional circumstances, the tropical examples of these 

 elastic capsules are by no means mere toys to be lightly 

 played with by babes and sucklings. The sand-box tree 

 of the West Indies has large round fruits, containing 

 seeds about as big as an English horsebean ; and the 

 capsule explodes, when ripe, with a detonation like a 

 pistol, scattering its contents with as much violence as a 

 shot from an air-gun. It is dangerous to go too near 

 these natural batteries during the shooting season. A 

 blow in the eye from one would blind a man instantly. 

 I well remember the very first night I spent in my own 

 house in Jamaica, where I went to live shortly after the 

 repression of ' Governor Eyre's rebellion,' as everybody 

 calls it locally. All night long I heard somebody, as I 

 thought, practising with a revolver in my own back garden : 

 a sound which somewhat alarmed me under those very 

 unstable social conditions. An earthquake about mid- 

 night, "it is true, diverted my attention temporarily from 

 the recurring shots, but didn't produce the slightest effect 

 upon the supposed rebel's devotion to the improvement 

 of his marksmanship. When morning dawned, however, 

 I found it was only a sand-box tree, and that the shots 

 were nothing more than the explosions of the capsules. 

 As to the wonderful tales told about the Brazilian 

 cannon-ball tree, I cannot personally endorse them from 

 original observation, and will not stain this veracious 

 page with any second-hand quotations from the strange 

 stories of modern scientific Munchausens. 



Still higher in the evolutionary scale than the elastic 



