34& TlMEHRI. 



the size of the first milk-weed, has drooping pinnate- 

 looking leaves, suggesting a sensitive plant, and may be 

 known at once by the minute globular green flowers and 

 fruit being set along the stalks at the back of the leaves, 

 which have to be raised to discover them. Perhaps for 

 this reason it is used as a remedy for all pains in the 

 back, much as the swollen and puffy capsules of the pop- 

 vine seem to have suggested its use for dropsy. 



Another common weed of the paths is the purslane, 

 with fleshy stems and leaves, and yellow flowers, too 

 familiar to need further description. This plant is so 

 constantly spoken of in the books as "a well-known 

 pot-herb," though no one ever heard of a dish of purs- 

 lane, that I once as a scientific experiment had some 

 boiled for a dinner vegetable. The result was a watery 

 and inferior kind of spinach, and I agree with the guarded 

 statement of an old writer on Barbados, that ''it may be 

 boil'd and us 'd when no better Greens are in Plenty." 



In moist par^s of the avenue and elsewhere we shall 

 see the small vivid blue blossoms of the blue pond-weed, 

 punda-grass, or water-grass (Commelyna nudiflora) , 

 which has straggling grass-like stems and leaves, and 

 three petals to the flower, the two side ones shaped like 

 tiny scoops ; it is sometimes called Demerara forget- 

 me-not. Under the trees we may notice the ere6l fleshy 

 purplish stems and scalloped succulent leaves of the 

 leaf-of-life plant (Bryophyllum calycinum) , which has a 

 curious way of perpetuating its kind ; the leaves are origi- 

 nally ternate, but some of the large leaflets drop off early, 

 and if they fall on damp soil put forth marginal buds, which 

 become perfect little plants long before the leaf has faded ; 

 hence it is sometimes called hen-and-chickens plant. 



