312 E. W. Berry — Fossil Sea Bean from Venezuela. 



efficacious remedy for dysentery. Naturalists before the 

 close of the 17th century had recognized their leguminous 

 nature and surmised that they had been drifted to Europe 

 from the Antilles by the Gulf Stream, although in the pop- 

 ular mind even among the educated their marine origin 

 and magic properties have lingered for over 250 years. 



Entada scandens is probably the best known tropical 

 plant distributed by ocean currents since its large lenticu- 

 lar dark kidney colored seeds have been for ages cast up 

 by the waves on the eastern shores of the Atlantic from 

 the Azores northward to Nova Zembla. Their seafaring 

 qualities and vitality are remarkable as is the distribu- 

 tion of the parent plant, since it is found in all of the 

 tropics and yet presents certain anomalies in its range 

 that have puzzled botanists since the days of Hooker and 

 Darwin. It is normally a climber with truly gigantic 

 pods, more or less constricted between each seed cavity, 

 and belongs to a genus with some 15 existing species about 

 half of which are African. There are 3 or 4 in the Ameri- 

 can tropics, one or two in the southeastern Asiatic region 

 and one in Madagascar. Most of these are not strand 

 plants and although Entada scandens also grows in inland 

 situations it is as a strand plant that it is principally 

 known, since it frequents mangrove associations and the 

 jungle behind tropical beaches. 



Some botanists dispute the identity of the old and new 

 world form but as regards the broader questions of dis- 

 tribution they may be considered identical since if speci- 

 fically distinct they are so closely related as to demand 

 direct filiation. Guppy, who has given us what is proba- 

 bly the best account of the question, finds some difficulty 

 in its occurrence on both shores of Central America but 

 this is the least of the difficulties since the littoral flora of 

 the present day largely antedates the present geographi- 

 cal conditions. This question, in the case of Entada, as 

 well as the home of the direct ancestor of Entada scan- 

 dens would appear to be set at rest by this discovery of 

 an almost identical form in the Miocene of Venezuela, 

 since it antedates the latest seaway across Central Amer- 

 ica. The fossil is also so much like the existing sea bean 

 that one is justified in assuming that it, like its descend- 

 ant, was distributed by ocean currents, its occurrence in 

 a clay lens in what appears to have been a rather wide- 

 spread marine series of deposits adding some probability 



