THE HOT-HOUSES. 20g 



The collection of M. Perrottet consisted of 

 eighty-five cases, containing five hundred and 

 thirty-four individuals from six inches to six feet 

 in height, of one hundred and fifty-eight different 

 species ; the greater part of which were want- 

 ing to the Museum, and many of them, to all the 

 gardens of Europe. The most interesting were 

 the true bread fruit-tree, artocarpus incisa, and 

 the variety produced by cultivation, whose fruit 

 without seeds forms the ordinary nourishment • 

 of the inhabitants of the South Sea islands (i) ; 

 the Jaca-tree, artocarpus integrifolia, of which 

 the fruit, shaped like a melon and often two 

 feet in length, is eaten in the Moluccas, though 

 inferior to the bread-fruit and full of large 

 seeds ; the betle pepper, piper betel, from which, 

 with a mixture of the nut of the cabbage-tree 

 and a little lime, the Indians make the prepara- 

 tion which they continually chew; the cabbage- 

 tree, areca faufel, a species of palm, whose 

 fruit forms an article of commerce in India ; the 

 cyclantus bifolius, considered by M. Poiteau as 

 a new genus of palm, togelher with several 

 other species of this family known only by the 

 descriptions of Aublet ; several cocoa nut-trees ; 



(i) The plants of the bread-tree without seeds brought from 

 Cayenne by M. Perrottet, are the shoots of a stock sent to that 

 colony from the King's Garden in 1797, and multiplied by M. Martin, 

 director of the nurseries. 



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