FOREIGN DRIFT OF THE TURKS ISLANDS 121 



black mottlings. The distinctions, however, especially as regards 

 the width of the raphe in the two species, sometimes disappear. 

 One finds at times drift seeds that might be referred to either kind, 

 and even the seeds of growing Jamaican plants of M. urens were 

 not always constant in their characters. 



Bentham, when describing Mucuna altissima in the Flora Brasi- 

 liensis (Mart. XV., part 1, p. 169, tab. 46, 1859-62), remarks that the 

 fruit is unknown; but he figures with a query under this name a 

 pod with seeds that are very like those designated " near urens " 

 in these pages. Grisebach (1864) describes the legume and seeds of 

 this species. The last are stated to be orbicular, compressed, eight to 

 ten-tenths of an inch in diameter, and almost wholly surrounded by 

 the raphe, a description, which, except for the smaller size, would 

 apply to the drift seeds of the " near urens " type. The last are 

 stated above to be rather over an inch across. The matter, how- 

 ever, requires further investigation. 



Authorities are agreed that Mucuna urens is widely spread in the 

 tropics of the Old and New World. In the latter it occurs in all the 

 larger as well as in many of the smaller West Indian islands, and 

 extends south to Peru and Brazil on the Pacific and Atlantic sea 

 borders. There has been apparently some uncertainty about the 

 limits of the species in the Old World, but there is no doubt that it 

 is found in tropical West Africa as well as ^n the Pacific islands 

 (Hawaii, Marquesas, Samoa) and in other regions. Mucuna altis- 

 sima, to which the seeds of the other kind probably belong, is, accord- 

 ing to Grisebach, a peculiar American species distributed over the 

 West Indies and occurring on Central America and in Brazil. 



The same two kinds of Mucuna seeds also came under my notice 

 frequently in the beach-drift of other parts of the West Indies besides 

 the Turks Islands — namely, in Trinidad, Tobago, Grenada, and in 

 Jamaica ; and in their association they are evidently very character- 

 istic of West Indian drift. On the beaches of Tobago and Trinidad, 

 where they are numerous and often encrusted with Balani, they occur 

 in nearly equal numbers. As far as I could judge from the Morris 

 collection of Jamaican beach-drift in the Kew Museum, the same two 

 sorts of Mucuna seeds are there represented under the name of 

 M. urens. As occurring in West Indian drift the seeds of both sorts 

 are usually sound and germinable. They are those that are trans- 

 ported across the Atlantic to Europe in the Gulf Stream drift. It 

 may be here stated that Ridley, in 1887, found two seeds of Mucuna 

 urens, D.C., stranded on Fernando Noronha, off the coast of Brazil 

 (Journ. Linn. Soc, vol. 27). The plant grows on the mainland; 

 but it is far more probable that the seeds were brought in the Main 

 Equatorial Current from the Gulf of Guinea. 



Peculiar (as far as my experience goes) to the Trinidad and Tobago 

 beach-drift are the seeds of another species of Mucuna readily recog- 

 nised by their larger size (lj-lj inch, 31-37 mm.), by their flatter 

 form, and by the great width of the encircling raphe (9 or 10 mm.). 

 They are greyish or brownish black, usually sound, and to quite half 

 of them the shells of marine organisms (annelids, cirripedes, etc.) 

 are attached, an indication of a previous flotation of months in the 



