202 DESCRIPTION OF THE MUSEUM. 



extremely useful to the inhabitants of Madagascar, 

 who cover their houses with the leaves and make 

 flour of the seeds, after extracting an oil from 

 the pellicle ; the strelitzia, a plant of the same 

 family lately introduced from the Cape, of which 

 the flower, partly scarlet and partly of a beautiful 

 blue, is singular in its form ; the carjota urens, a 

 very rare species of Indian palm, with pinnate 

 leaves composed of notched, triangular leaflets § 

 the littcea, a shrub of the narcissus family re- 

 cently procured from Italy by M.Bosc, taken at 

 first for a yucca, on account of its narrow 

 pendant leaves, fringed with white threads like 

 those of the yucca filamentosa; the pimento, or 

 allspice, a species of myrtle from Jamaica, which 

 owes its name to the smell and taste of its leaves, 

 branches, and fruit ; the psydium, or guava ; the 

 eugenia j'ambos, whose fruit sheds a rich perfume ; 

 the brucea ferruginea (1), brought by Bruce 

 from Abyssinia ; the olive-tree with notched 

 leaves, a superb tree of India and Madagascar 

 with esculent fruit, of which M. du Petit-Thouars 



posed in the form of a fan. The inhabitants of Madagascar call it the 

 traveller's tree, because the sheaths of the petioles form reservoirs, 

 which are always filled with fresh and limpid water. 



(1) M. de Lamark, who first described it, gave it the name of the 

 brucea auti-dysenterica, because in its native country the leaves are 

 regarded as a specific for the dysentery. Bruce employed them with 

 success. 



