APPENDIX 



457 



Diablo in the heart of Jamaica and 1500 or 1600 feet above the sea, 

 33 per cent, of the seeds floated in sea-water. All these facts and 

 inferences for Guilandina in the West Indies invite further inquiry 

 into the relation between seed-buoyancy and station. Guilandina 

 bonducella, true to its behaviour in the tropics of the Old World, 

 possesses typically buoyant seeds. The difficulty of connecting a 

 littoral station with seed-buoyancy is concerned with G. bonduc and 

 the inland species of the genus. 



A few remarks on the station of Guilandina bonduc in the West 

 Indies may here be added. Sloane, writing of the plants of Jamaica 

 in the latter part of the seventeenth century (Nat. Hist. Jam., II., 

 41), states that the Nicker plant with yellow seeds (G. bonduc) grew 

 everywhere in the Jamaican savannahs. I found it associated with 

 G. bonducella on the beaches of St. Croix; and the two species are 

 characteristic littoral plants in the Virgin Islands (Harshberger, 

 Phyt. N. Amer., p. 686). It grows, according to Grisebach, on the 

 sandy seashore of Antigua. 



I raised some young plants of perhaps an undescribed species 

 from chocolate-brown Guilandina seeds gathered from amongst the 

 Orinoco drift washed up on the south coast of Trinidad. The seeds 

 are ovoid but rather compressed, and measure 27 x 20 x 14 mm., 

 and float buoyantly. The plants, when eight inches high, had 

 prickly stems. The leaflets, in three or four pairs, were three to 

 four inches long, lanceolate or ovato-lanceolate, with a rounded, 

 rather oblique base, and a long tapering aristate apex. 



The species, above mentioned as growing as a stout climber in 

 young wood 1500 or 1600 feet above the sea on Mount Diablo in 

 Jamaica, may perhaps be one of Urban' s Cuban species. It was 

 neither in flower nor in fruit, the seeds (yellow, oblong, 23 x 15 mm.) 

 of the previous season lying on the ground. The leaflets, in five or 

 six pairs, were two to three inches long, oblong or obovate, rounded 

 or subcordate at the slightly oblique base, with usually a tapering 

 apex terminating in a hair-line point. No stipules observed. 



Note 10 (p. 122). 



Mucuna pruriens, DC. 



The use of the name Mucuna pruriens, DC, as applied to a species 

 with large globoid seeds, an inch across, which occur in West Indian 

 beach- drift and are washed up on the shores of Europe, has led to 

 some confusion. It is not clear how the confusion arose; but two 

 species have been thus confounded, M. pruriens, DC, an annual and 

 a weed of cultivation which has been spread by man all around the 

 tropics, and M. urens, DC, a stout-stemmed, woody climber that 

 grows on high trees at the borders of forests in the New and in the 

 Old World and is found also at the coast. The first is known as the 

 Cow-itch plant, and, as I observed in the West Indies, is common in 

 land once cultivated, as in abandoned sugar-cane fields. The plant 

 is a great nuisance when the pods dry and the covering of stinging 

 hairs comes off. In Tobago it was credited with keeping Indian 



