156 PLANTS, SEEDS, AND CURRENTS 



Cuba. It would only be found near the beach when forested hill- 

 slopes descend directly to the coast. In Jamaica it is certainly not 

 a littoral tree, and this is also the view of Grisebach. However, 

 Descourtilz, as quoted by Hemsley (Chall. Bot., IV., 298), and 

 Schimper (Ind. Mai. Strand Flora, pp. 108, 182) speak of it as a 

 West Indian strand tree. 



I found a few of the small globular fruits amongst the beach-drift 

 of the north and south shores of Jamaica, some of them empty and 

 some of them bearing sound seeds. Fruits with sound seeds were 

 picked up by Morris on the south coast of the island (Hemsley, 

 Ibid.). The manner in which its buoyant fruits could reach the sea 

 is indicated in the station of the tree on the banks of a branch of 

 the Spanish River in the mountain forest zone of eastern Jamaica 

 (Forrest Shreve in Harshberger's Phytogr. N. Amer., p. 679). I 

 collected a few of the fruits amongst the foreign drift of the beaches 

 of the Turks Islands, but they were either empty or contained a 

 greatly shrunken dead seed. 



If this was a typical strand tree in the West Indies, with its fruits 

 dispersed far and wide by the currents, we should expect it to play 

 the part taken by Calophyllum inophyllum in the Pacific, as above 

 referred to. We should expect to see it establishing itself on the 

 sandy islets thrown up in coral-reef regions, as on the Florida sand- 

 keys, and to find it included amongst the indigenous flora of a group 

 like the Bermudas. Dr. Millspaugh does not mention it in the case 

 of the Florida keys so systematically examined by Mr. Lansing; 

 whilst it is admitted to be an introduced plant in the Bermudas, 

 and apparently it belongs also to the foreign plants of the Bahamas 

 (Chall. Bot., II., 21 ; IV., 298). 



Hemsley regards it as dispersed by the currents (Ibid., L, 42) ; and 

 this is the opinion also of Schimper, who couples C. inophyllum and 

 C. calaba together as possessing a well-developed floating apparatus 

 in the shell of the fruit (p. 182). But whilst Nature has emphatically 

 demonstrated that the first is dispersed by currents far and wide 

 over the insular and continental coasts of the Indian and Pacific 

 Oceans, she gives no consistent indications of the same kind for the 

 second. In Jamaica and Cuba, C. calaba is essentially a tree of the 

 inland forests, and its fruits make a very poor show in the beach- 

 drift. Although it is possible that the currents might carry the sound 

 fruits to a distant shore, it is scarcely likely that a tree accustomed 

 to the humid conditions of an inland forest would be able to establish 

 itself on a beach. However, the germinative capacity of the seeds 

 appeared to be soon lost ; and in an experiment on the buoyancy of 

 the dry fruits I found that whilst they all floated for two or three 

 weeks, those that floated for a longer period had rotting seeds. I 

 would imagine that, as compared with the Pacific species, the fruit- 

 shell is more pervious to water in prolonged flotation. 



Sapindus saponaria, L. (Soap-berry) 



This is an American tree usually described as confined to Florida, 

 the West Indies, and Venezuela. A specimen obtained by Forster 



