338 
THE TROPICAL 
AGRICULTURIST. [October r, 1881. 
and of T. Arjuna, t. 28, he says : "bark smooth, 
■whitish or green," whilst Kurz, " Forest Flora of 
British Burma," 1. 458, writing of T. crenulata, Eoth, 
quotes B'ddome's t. '28 (for T. Arjuna), and says : 
"bark thick, brittle, dark grey, deeply longitudinally 
cracked.'" In Roxburgh's and Wight and Amott's 
descriptions of some of their species included in the 
foreg dug, the bark is also described as either smooth 
or deeply cracked, and Mr. Clarke therefore, not being 
able to make use of these most conflicting statements, 
has perhaps wisely avoided any allusion to them 
as characters. The old external layer of bark of our 
Ceylon kumbuk is in every case remarkable by its 
•ex f oliaiing in large or small sheets, leaving the under 
bark very smooth, shining, and of a somewhat mot- 
tled gre n color, and in this respect resembling in 
appearance the plane tree, Platanus oriental U, the 
birch, Be.lula aihi, Protium caudatum, Balsamoden- 
■dron, Berrt/i, Odina Wodier, and the common guava, 
Psidium Guyana.' On the subject of this peculiarity 
Of the bark of the kumbuk, the following explana- 
tion of the scaling of the bai-k of the plane tree 
is so applicable to that of the kumbuk, that the 
reason giv 11 for this peculiarity may be the same 
in both cases : — 
" The trunk and branches are clothed with smooth 
light-coloured bark which scales off annually in broad 
irregular patches, giving the tree a singularly speckled 
app -aranee when bare of its foliage.. This scaling off 
of the bark is said to be occasioned by the rigidity 
of its tis-ue, incapable of stretching as the wood 
beueath increases in diameter." — Garcl. Atag.Bot., 1,239. 
It is a well-known fact in Ceylon that the Hig-gaha, 
Odina Wodier, is the tree which grows most readily 
by slips or cuttings, and Sir Joseph Hooker, "Fl. Brit. 
Ind.," 2.29, givts the following reason for this pecu- 
liarity : — " The tissues abound in starch, whence it 
is most easy to increase this tree by cuttings of almost 
any part." Does the scaling off of the bark in the 
kumbuk, plane, and the other trees mentioned, in- 
dicate that they contain excess of lime in their tissues ? 
Avoiding the Scylla of the bark distinction, Dr. 
Brandis has seized the Charybdis of the venation of 
the fruits, and Mr. Clarke is, I dare say, glad to 
avail of this supposed tangible character. It will 
be seen that it is by "the character of the venation 
of the fruit by which Dr. Brandis has separated 
T. Arjuna and T. tomentosa." The fruits of T. Ar- 
juna are " 1-2 inches (long) nearly glabro :s ovoid — 
or obovoid— oblong, the wings not very broad, their 
striatums- curving much upwards. " And again, 
'* wings of the fruit usually truncate or suddenly 
narrowed at the top." Several hundred fruits col- 
lected from several trees in Colombo have every 
character to agree with these, some of the wings 
being trunca'ed, and others not on the same fruit, 
and a very large portion of them being long ovate, 
and either gradually or suddenly accumulated to a 
long or short point, in fact, they, assume several 
shapes and forms, but the sharp-edged wings are 
very conspicuous in all, and in all those I have seen 
the striations curve much upwards, and, therefore, 
if this be a good character, our Ceylon tree must 
be T. Arjuna. 
The fruit of T. tomentosa is "1-2 inches (lon»), 
glabrom or hoary obovoid-oblong, wing broad 
striations carried horizontally to the edge." (Brandis, 
"Forest Flora," 225. ) In none of the fruits ex- 
amined by me do the striations run horizontally to 
the edge, and in this respect the fruits of our Colombo 
trees are different from those of T. tomentosa, but I 
am not satisfied that the character is a good one, 
and I therefore believe that the T. Arjuna and T. 
tompnlona, as given above, are one species, our Cey- 
lon form of the tree all through the island being so 
constant in its characters that Dr. Thwaites gives only 
one, C. P. 1603, number for it. 
1 The question of the large quantity of pure lime in the 
tissue of this tree is a very important one in respect 
to lime in the soil where it is found. In 
this respect its existence may indicate a supply of 
lime in the soil and thus aid planters in selecting soils 
for certain purposes, but as it is a plant loving the 
edges of rivers, lakes, or tanks, it is probable that it 
elaborates the lime from the water near which 
it grows. 
(4), Lime in the Wood of Teak.— (Cutting from the 
Ceylon Observer, No. 85, of 13th April 1878.)— Phoms, of 
Riga, says the Academy? has directed attention (Ber. 
deut. chem. Gesell , January 14, 1878, 2234) to tne 
occurrence of a white deposit in teak wood ( J'eclona 
grandis), consisting es-entially of lime phosphate, 
PCaH0 4 . His views in regard to this do ..-it were 
confirmed, it is stated, by his finding 29 (j per cent, 
of phosphoric acid in the ash of the wood. A chemist 
of this couniry made the same observations ixteen 
years ago, and they are playfully recorded in a rhyme 
published at the time : — 
" Or when dyspeptic ami exceeding weak, 
Will re id on salts phospliatic, frundin teak.-' 
5. The allusion to the u-e of the ashes of the kumbuk 
tree as a whitewash in the following extract fr m the 
"Treasury of Botany" has evidently been borrowed from 
the passage already quoted from Buchanan's Travels 
in Mysore, &c. : 
" Pentaptera glabra is a large smooth-barked timber 
tree with a trunk six or eight feet in diameter and from 
fifty to eighty feet high, wi'hout a branch. It is 
common in the teak forests of Pegu, and affords 
an excellent dark-brown timber, useful for mast-pieces 
spars, and other purposes connected with shipbuild- 
ing. In Canara, on the western coast of the pen- 
insula of India, the natives obtain a kind of lime by 
calcining the bark and wood, which they prefer to 
ordinary lime for eating with betel-nut, and also use 
for whitewashing. — [A. S.]" 
I may here mention that I first noticed the large 
kumbuk trea at Mutuwal, in 1849, in the following 
manner. I was then returning from Jaffna in a 
dhoney, and was so satiated with the " orient- 
al luxury " of travelling in this peculiar kind 
of vessel, that when off Negombo I began anxiously 
to look out for indications of the land near Colombo, 
and noticed in a line with the coast what I sup- 
posed was a mass of vegetation on the island in the 
mouth of the Kelani river, as it looked entirely 
isolated from any other feature. On asking the dhoney- 
men what this was, they at once replied: "Oh! 
sir, that is the big kumbuk tree at Mutuwal. which 
answers for a land-mark for us when we are out fish- 
ing or making for Colombo from the north." I took 
an early opportunity of visiting this tree, and have 
ever since taken strangers to see it as one of the 
"lions" of Colombo, Several years ago the beauty 
and usefulness of this tree as a land-mark .vere greatly 
destroyed by several cartloads of its upper branches 
having been cut off. In April 1879, I took Mr. Grig- 
son' to photograph it as the first of a series of the 
remarkable trees of Ceylon, copies of which were to 
be sent to Dr. Bennett, the distinguished naturalist 
of Sydney. On inquiry from the natives living 
near the tree I learned that the branches had been 
cut down for the special lime obtained from their ' 
ashes for the repair of St. John's Roman Catholic 
Church, situated close to the spot. It was also- stated 
that when the wood was burnt no ashes except the 
lime remained. I again measured this tree on this 
occasion, and found that it was 45 feet round the 
base and 24-^ feet at 8 feet from the ground. Its 
bark has been chipped off all round the trunk, and 
is used by the natives to chew with their betel leaf. 
In the forks of the higher branches plantB of the 
common orchid Cymbidium aloifolium, Sw., and 
of the curious Psihtum triquetrum, Sw., may be seen. 
