1902] 



BRIEFER ARTICLES 



229 



planters, but so far as I am aware no photographs of the way it lux- 

 uriates have been published. It may be interesting to those who have 

 not seen the plant in its own home to look at a photographic repro- 

 duction of a large patch of it which I observed recently in Ceylon. 



I was returning from Peradeniya to Colombo and the train stopped 

 for a few minutes at a way station in the lowlands, an hour's ride 

 from the city, just long enough, in fact, to allow me to get a snap-shot 



Mimosa pulica, as it grows luxuriantly in Ceylon. 



of a field quite disfigured by Mimosa. The cattle pastured in the 



field had eaten the herbage closely around the plant, leaving it strictly 



alone, and as it crept across the meadow it killed out all other plants, 



forming a dense deep patch of spiny, creeping stems and delicate pink 



blossoms, which resembled miniature dandelion or thistle heads gone 

 to seed. 



The leaves were all expanded horizontally as I approached, but 

 when my feet shook the soft earth, like a hermit crab draws into its 

 shell, or a coral'pulls in its tentacles, the plants, in the radius of the 

 shaken ground, quickly folded their leaflets together and dropped their 

 leaves into the characteristic position of rest which everyone knows 

 who has seen the living plant. 



To one acquainted only with the delicate specimens in European 

 and American greenhouses, the novelty of walking over such beds of 





