288 
DT.TEltMINATIONS OF TBB 
The Mediterrariean littoral of Prance, Italy and Sicily are said to 
contain Opuntia nana, Opimtia Ficns^indica of Gussone and most later 
authors, Ojmntia Opuntia inermis^ DC., and Opuntia amyclcday 
Ten. A footnote^ below shows how ill-used has been the name 
** Ficus-indica,^'' and that Opuntia decumana is commonly indicated by 
it. 
Opuntia decumana, Haw., is cultivated in Malta, and in other 
places. 
founded the species, Miljler put under it plants which grew wild on roadsides in Italy, 
about Naples, in Sicily and in Spain, and which would stand exposuie to the open air in 
sheltered corners in England. It may be that Miller had confused two unlike plants 
together ; but it is beyond doubt that the Opuntia now established in Switzerland, the 
Tyrol, Northern Italy and elsewhere is not the plant figured first by Lobel and then 
by Johann Bauhin, to which the name “ vulgaris " belongs, although it may have been 
included in the second part of Miller’s Opuntia vulgaris : therefore it is safer and 
wiser to use Visiani’s name “ nana for this plant. 
On the ground that the figure shows one thoim the suggestion may be made 
that it was Opuntia monacantha which these old authors figured. Furiher Opuntia 
monacantha was undoubtedly in cultivation from about their times; under the 
figure in the Kew copy of LobeFs leones some old hand has written “ commonly 
grows in gentlemen’s gardens in England and there is preserved at the British 
Museum of Natural History, South Kensington, an undoubted example of Opuntia 
monacantha fi'om the garden of Mary, Duchess of Somerset, who lived from about 
1630 to 1714. I believe that the origin of O. vulgaris is O. monacantha; but 
I strongly deprecate any change of name in consequence. 
” The Opuntia Ficus-indica of most authors can hardly refer to any other plant 
th^n Opuntia decumana ; it certainly is not Miller’s plant, nor is it Linnaeus’. 
The name “ Ficus-indica ” was devised by Miller for the second of the species 
in Toumefort’s Institutiones Rei Eerharice, i, (1719), p. 239, which was a plant in 
cultivation in the Royal Gardens, Paris, in 1665. Miller having founded the species 
put under it something that he knew as growing in Jamaica, — “ the most common 
sort in Jamaica, and upon the fruit wild cochineal feeds,” having stars of long bristly 
thorns and bright yellow flowers and a puiqile spiny f]‘uit which, eaten, colours the 
urine bloody. If we cannot ascertain for certain what was the species named by 
Tournefort “ Opuntia folio oblongo media ” [and this is only possible if an adequate 
specimen can be found in Tournefort’s herbarium at the Jardin des plantes, Paris], 
then we may take Miller’s most common Jamaican plant as the type of Opuntia 
Ficus-indica. 
Karl Schumann in his Verhreitung der CactacecB (Anhang zu den Abliandlungen 
der Konigl. Preuss. Akad. der Wissenschaften zu Berlin vom Jahre 1899), p. 30, 
says that Opuntia Tuna is the commonest of the species in the West Indie.s ; but 
tuming to his Gesamtheschreihung der Kacteen, (18991, p, 723, we find that he 
cannot have had a clear idea of what Opuntia Tuna is ; for he cites as illustrations of it 
(1) a figure in the Botanic Register (plate 255), which is ceriainly of Opuntia 
Filleniiy and (2) a figure in DeCundolle’s Plantes Grasses (plate 137), which is very 
probably of Opuntia tomentosa [vide Berger in the Monutsekriftjur Kactcenkunde, 
