458 



APPENDIX 



coolies out of the island. The second is known in the West and 

 East Indies as the Horse-eye and Donkey-eye plant, from the peculiar 

 appearance of the seeds. Its pods have also a covering of stinging 

 hairs ; but, as the writer knows from a personal experience of both 

 plants, the irritation produced from this cause is much less than 

 with the Cow-itch. 



It is not often that we can recognise the confusion between the 

 two species as clearly as we can in the case of a reference to Mucuna 

 pruriens in the System of Botany, by Le Maout and Decaisne (Engl, 

 edit., 1873, p. 373). We there read that it is an Indian annual called 

 Cow-itch, the seed being " called Donkey's Eye, from the large, 

 pupil-like areola of the testa." Here we have the true M. pruriens 

 credited with the seeds of M. urens, the seeds of the two species 

 being, as will be shown below, utterly different in appearance. An 

 «rror in the reverse direction is sometimes found. Thus Hillebrand, 

 in his book on the flora of the Hawaiian Islands, after describing the 

 true M. mens observes that it is " well known as the Cow- itch plant " 

 and is a native of the West Indies and of tropical America. The 

 true M. pruriens, which is a pest both for man and beast in old 

 clearings and abandoned cultivations, is the plant, it may be here 

 repeated, that is known as Cow-itch. 



In his Report on the Botany of the Challenger Expedition (I., 43; 

 IV., 141, 277, 299) Hemsley applies the name of Mucuna pruriens, 

 DC, to the Mucuna seeds found in West Indian beach-drift and 

 washed up on the coasts of Europe. The seed which at the end of 

 the seventeenth century Sloane recognised amongst the stranded 

 seeds (Molucca beans) of the Orkney Islands as the " Horse-eye 

 bean " familiar to him in Jamaica (Phil Trans., XIX., 398, 1695-7) 

 is identified in this report (IV., 277) as M. pruriens. The two species 

 are there mentioned under the name of M. pruriens, DC, on 

 different pages. In the one case, we have a plant " commonly 

 cultivated and now almost cosmopolitan in the tropics" (IV., 141). 

 In the other case, it is a plant the seeds of which were found by 

 Morris in Jamaican beach-drift, and they are described as " some- 

 times washed ashore on the western coast of Europe " (IV., 299). 

 As is remarked below, the seeds of M. pruriens proper do not occur 

 in beach-drift and possess no floating powers. 



Yet as a result of the confusion, which probably dates back to the 

 early part of last century, botanists must have often experienced the 

 same difficulties. For instance, Ernst in his account of the new 

 flora of Krakatau (1908, pp. 36, 37, 41, 46) mentions M. pruriens 

 DC, as amongst the new vegetation that has established itself since 

 the great eruption on the coasts of the neighbouring island of Ver- 

 laten, where it climbs on the strand trees. Schimper makes no 

 reference to such a species in his work on the Indo-Malayan strand 

 flora, and we can only conjecture that it was not the annual species, 

 the weed of cultivation, to which this specific name was originally 

 applied. 



It would seem that botanists have been misled by the lack of any 

 description of the seed of Mucuna pruriens in the works most acces- 

 sible to them, De Candolle's Prodromus (tome II., 1825) and Grise- 



