According to Mr. Lockhart a frutescent species of 445] Euphorbia, about eight feet in height, with cylindrical stem and branches, was observed, planted on the graves of the natives near several of the villages; but of this, which may be what Captain Tuckey has called Cactus quadrangularis in his Narrative (p. 115), there is no specimen in the herbarium.
COMPOSITÆ. It is unnecessary here to enter into the question whether this family of plants, of which upwards of 3000 species are already known, ought to be considered as a class or as an order merely; the expediency of subdividing it, and affixing proper names to the divisions, being generally admitted. The divisions or tribes proposed by M. Cassini, in his valuable dissertations on this family, appear to be the most natural, though as yet they have not been very satisfactorily defined.
The number of Compositæ in the collection is only twenty-four, more than half of which are referable to Heliantheæ and Vernoniaceæ of M. Cassini. The greater part of these are unpublished species, and among them are five new genera. The published species belong to other divisions, and are chiefly Indian: but one of them, Ageratum conyzoides, is common to America and India; the Struchium (or Sparganophorus) of the collection does not appear to me different from that of the West Indies; and Mikania chenopodifolia, a plant very general on this line of coast, though perhaps confined to it, belongs to a genus of which all the other species are found only in America. Baron Humboldt has stated[1] that Compositæ form one sixth of the Phænogamous plants within the tropics, and that their proportion gradually decreases in the higher latitudes until in the frigid zones it is reduced to one thirteenth. But in the herbarium from Congo Compositæ form only one twenty-third, and both in Smeathman's collection from Sierra Leone and in Dr. Roxburgh's Flora Indica, a still smaller part, of the Phænogamous plants. In the northern part of New Holland they form about one
- ↑ In op. citat.
