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I was led to this subject by an interesting, but short paper by Professor Asa Gray on the movements of the tendrils of some Cucurbitaceous plants.
On the following day I made a long and very fatiguing march to Choongtam, but the coolies were not all able to accomplish it. The backwardness of the flora in descending was even more conspicuous than on the previous day: the jungles, at 7000 feet, being gay with a handsome Cucurbitaceous plant.
All the grass was of one kind, a new species of Panicum related to P. effusum R. Br.* and not a spike of it was left in the soil over the whole of the ground. A cucurbitaceous plant had also been pulled up and accumulated in smaller heaps; and from some of the roots the little yam had been taken, but on others it remained. The surface, naturally soft, thus appeared as bare as a fallow field.
I saw but one flower of it, but its falcate seed-vessels, often more than a foot long, were very numerous. Pandanus spiralis was frequent. A pretty species of Commelyna, on the flats, a cucurbitaceous plant with quinquepalmate leaves and large white blossoms, grew along the river, the approaches of which were rendered almost inaccessible by a stiff high grass.
After clasping an upright stick, they repeatedly loosed it again, and often would not seize it at all, or their extremities did not coil closely round. I have observed hundreds of tendrils belonging to various Cucurbitaceous, Passifloraceous, and Leguminous plants, and never saw one behave in this manner.
We walked to a stream, which flows at the base of the retiring sand-cliffs, and nourishes a dense and richly-varied jungle, producing many plants, as beautiful Acanthaceae, Indian horse-chesnut, loaded with white racemes of flowers, gay Convolvuli, laurels, terrestrial and parasitic Orchideae, Dillenia, casting its enormous flowers as big as two fists, pepper, figs, and, in strange association with these, a hawthorn, and the yellow-flowered Indian strawberry, which ascends 7,500 feet on the mountains, and Hodgsonia, a new Cucurbitaceous genus, clinging in profusion to the trees, and also found 5000 feet high on the mountains.
Salya is called Artayani after the name of his father. 381. i.e., the universal destroyer armed with his bow. Gory mace wet with &c. the original is pleonastic. The Bengal reading parantapa is a mistake for kathanchana. 'Kimpaca' is a species of cucurbitaceous plant. To avoid periphrasis I render it poison.
I say apparent dryness, for my hygrometric observations prove that the atmosphere of Cumana and Araya contains nearly nine-tenths of the quantity of watery vapour necessary to its perfect saturation. It is this air, at once hot and humid, that nourishes those vegetable reservoirs, the cucurbitaceous plants, the agaves and melocactuses half-buried in the sand.
As great a paucity of grass also prevailed here, except on the riverbank, and as great an abundance of the same atriplex and cucurbitaceous plants as I had noticed elsewhere. July 6. From a tree at our camp a range was observed in the south-west, having become visible from refraction, and this rendered it still more probable that the river would continue its westerly course.
We have seen that such discs are formed by two species of Bignonia, by Ampelopsis, and, according to Naudin, by the Cucurbitaceous genus Peponopsis adhaerens. In Anguria the lower surface of the tendril, after it has wound round a stick, forms a coarsely cellular layer, which closely fits the wood, but is not adherent; whilst in Hanburya a similar layer is adherent.
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