Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/413

Rh of the land with their brilliant colors, which occur in such masses that they are the admiration of all who see them. On the bleak north shores, the tamarisk has been planted as a break against wind and salt-water. Though not an especially graceful shrub, the soft green of its fine-cut foliage makes a pleasant impression on the eye, and it enjoys the great practical advantage of being about the only kind of verdure that can really thrive in the presence of the abundant salt-spray which the prevailing winds drive in upon the land.

The fiddle-wood tree (Citharexylum quadrangulare) is to-day the commonest of the deciduous trees in Bermuda, but the first tree of this species on the islands—the one from which all the others are reported to have come—was imported as recently as 1830, and is still standing. The Pride of India (Melia azedarach) is a rather scraggy, forlorn looking tree in mid-summer, and one wonders why it is so much cultivated; but in early spring, before the leaves are out, it puts forth a profusion of pink flowers that makes it a great favorite with the Bermudians. It seems as though Bermuda must be the home of the genius Hibiscus, so many species are met with. In mid-summer their blossoms exhibit some remarkably gorgeous colors. Still, the most superb of all the ornamental trees and shrubs to be seen here is the Poinciana regia, a native of Madagascar, a tree with spreading branches clothed in the most pleasing green and decked with beautiful clusters of brilliant red blossoms.

The land animals, with the exception of insects and mollusks, are remarkably few, and of these most are probably not natives of the islands any more than are the majority of the phænogamic plants.

Except for domesticated animals, mammals are numerous neither in species nor in individuals. The most interesting one is doubtless the wood rat (Mus tectorum), which lives in trees and is now nearly extinct. This was at one time a dreaded scourge to the early settlers. Nearly 300 years ago (1619), Governor Butler, writing of the timely arrival of a so-called runaway frigate that brought food and thus averted impending famine, said:

But howsoever this runne away frigate brought with her a timely and acceptable sacrifice of her meale; yet the companions of her meale, numbers of ratts (which wer the first that the ilands ever sawe), being received with-all and on a soudaine multiplyinge themselves by an infinite increase (for ther is noe place in the world so proper for them), within the space of one only yeare they became so terrible to the poore inhabitants, as that (like one of Pharaoths plagues) the whole plantation was almost utterly subverted therby; and so farr gone it was at last, that it proved Captaine Tucker's masterpiece all his time (which was not long after) to devise trapps and stratagems to conquer and destroye them, though indeed all of them proved to noe purpose (as you shall see hereafter) untill afterwards, one moneth of cold and wett weather did the deed.