148 
NEW PLANTS. 
is generally, in the port of Cumana, from 25 - 2° to 20'3°. 
The first plant we gathered on the continent of America 
was the Avicennia tomentosa,* which in this place scarcely 
reaches two feet in height. This shrub, together with the 
sesuvium, the yellow gomplirena, and the cactus, cover soil 
impregnated with muriate of soda ; they belong to that small 
number of plauts which live in society like the heath of 
Europe, and which in the torrid zone are found only on the 
seashore, and on the elevated plains of the Audes.f The 
Avicennia of Cumana is distinguished by another peculiarity 
not less remarkable: it furnishes an instance of a plant 
common to the shores of South America and the coasts of 
Malabar. 
The Indian pilot led us across his garden, which rather 
resembled a copse than a piece of cultivated ground. He 
showed us, as a proof of the fertility of this climate, a silk- 
cotton tree (Bombax beptapbyllum), the trunk of wliich, in 
its fourth year, had reached nearly two feet and a half in 
diameter. "We have observed, on the banks of the Orinoco 
and the river Magdalena, that the bombax, the carolinea, the 
ochroma, and other trees of the family of the malvacese, are 
of extremely rapid growth. I nevertheless think that there 
was some exaggeration in the report of the Indian respect- 
ing the age of his bombax ; for under the temperate zone, in 
the hot and damp lands of North America, between the 
Mississippi and the Alleghany mountains, the trees do not 
exceed a foot in diameter, in ten years. Vegetation in those 
parts is in general but a fifth more speedy than in Europe, 
even taking as an example the Platanus occidentalis, the 
tulip tree, and the Cupressus disticha, which reach from nine 
to fifteen feet in diameter. On the strand of Cumana, in the 
garden of the Guayqueria pilot, we saw for the first time a 
quama% loaded with flowers, and remarkable for the extreme 
* Mangle prieto. 
f On the extreme rarity of the social plants in the tropics, see my 
“.Essay on the Geog. of Plants, ” p. 19; and a paper by Mr. Brown 
on the Proteacea, ‘‘Trans, of the Lin. Soc.,” vol. x., p. 1, p. 23, in 
which that great botanist has extended and confirmed by numerous facts 
my ideas on the association of plants of the same species. 
X Inga spuria, which we must not confound with the common inga, Inga 
vera, Willd. (Mimosa Inga, Linn.). The white stamina, which, to the num- 
ber of sixty or seventy, are attached to a greenish corolla, have a silky lustre, 
