ADDISONIA 3 
(Plate 2) 
CASSIA POLYPHYLLA 
Many-leaved Senna 
Native of the West Indies 
Family CAESALPINIACEAE SENNA Family 
Cassia polyphylla Jacq. Coll. 4: 104. 1790. 
Usually a shrub nine feet high or less, or a small tree up to 
twelve feet high, but recorded as sometimes becoming a tree forty- 
five feet high. The branches are slender, and the young twigs 
loosely and sparingly hairy. The leaves, which are from three 
quarters of an inch to nearly three inches long, are hairy when 
young, but nearly smooth when old, almost sessile, and clustered 
at the nodes of the sepee they have minute stipules about one 
of an inch long, and five to fifteen pairs of small obovate 
or oblong leaflets not Ste than one quarter of an inch long, which 
are blunt or notched at the apex, three-nerved and few-veined. 
The showy yellow flowers are borne one or two together on pea 
ary peduncles, which are shorter than the leaves. The some- 
what unequal sepals are oval and blunt. The spreading petals are 
obovate, short-clawed, and about half an inch long. The narrowly 
linear, flat, drooping pods are nearly straight, six inches long or 
less, about one quarter of an inch wide, stalked, short-tipped, 
brown, becoming black and shining, at length splitting into two 
thin valves. The seeds are flat and nearly round. 
The species was first described from plants derived from Porto 
Rico, which flowered prior to 1790, in April and May, in the green- 
house of the Royal Garden at Schénbrunn, near Vienna. As a 
shrub, it is a common element of the vegetation of the southern 
and southwestern dry portions of Porto Rico, where it glorifies 
hillsides and plains in the spring by its profuse bright yellow 
flowers. It has been taken into gardens in that region, growing 
there readily and blooming freely; in gardens at Guanica, flowering 
masses were seen which were as strikingly golden as any yellow- 
flowering plant could be. The plant which furnished the spray for 
the accompanying illustration was grown from seed collected by us 
near Ponce in 1906, and is now about five feet high. 
Cassia polyphylla has been found in Hispaniola, and inhabits 
also the Danish islands St. Thomas and St. Croix; I further ob- 
served it in 1913 on Anegada, the most eastern of the Virgin Islands, 
where it grows on a low rocky plain. I have never seen the plant 
higher than about twelve feet; the statement that it attains much 
