278 A MISSION TO VITI. 
therefore more readily recommend itself to the white 
settler, as it requires hardly any clearing, and would be 
immediately available for cattle-breeding and cotton- 
growing. 
The coast-line of most of the islands is enriched by 
a dense, more or less broken, belt of cocoa-nut palms. 
White beaches, formed of decomposed corals, may be 
traced for miles; whilst good soil in many instances ex- 
tends quite to the water’s edge, and trees, not numbering 
amongst the strictly littoral vegetation, overhang the 
sea. Mangrove swamps are limited, and chiefly confined 
to the mouths of the rivers; hence the almost total 
freedom of the country from malignant fevers. In the 
windward islands, Lakeba and its dependencies, the 
weeping iron-wood (Casuarina equisetifolia, Forst.), in- 
termingled with screw-pines (Pandanus odoratissimus, 
Linn.), abounds, and considerable tracts of country are 
covered with the common brake and other hard-leaved 
ferns: they prefer an open country, and have taken 
possession where little else will grow. Wherever these 
forms of vegetation occur on the weather side of the 
group, the soil may be expected to be rather poor. It 
would, however, be erroneous to apply the same rule to 
the leeward side, where they are also tolerably abun- 
dant, not because the soil is too poor to support a dense 
herbaceous or woody vegetation, but because the air is 
destitute of that excessive moisture, and the country 
less visited by numerous showers of rain, promoting the 
luxuriant growth on the weather side. 
The general physiognomy of the flora is decidedly 
tropical; tree-ferns, branching grasses, six or seven dif- 
