Page:Voyage in search of La Perouse, volume 1 (Stockdale).djvu/54

44 We were three hours before we arrived at Laguna. This town is only 5,130 toies ditant from St. Croix; but the road thither is very fatiguing, as it acends for the greater part of the way. The place is meanly built, and very thinly inhabited. We were informed that at leat one half of its inhabitants conits of monks.

On our way to Laguna we paed over ome barren mountains, which were covered with a variety of plants of a luxurious growth. Amongt others we noticed the euphorbia canarienis, the euphorbia dendroides, the cacalia kleinia, the cachis opuntia, &c. Thee plants, as they derive their nourihment almot entirely from the atmophere, thrive very well in pite of the terility of the abrupt precipices on which they grow. When we decended into the mall plain on which the town tands, we remarked that the mould produced from the corruption of the vegetables, and wahed down from the urrounding mountains by the rain, anwers a very ueful purpoe in fertilizing this little pot of ground, o that it yields abundance of corn, Indian wheat, millet, and other eculent plants.

I here oberved a pecies of the periploca, which I had formerly dicovered during my travels in the Levant. I have given an account of it in the econd decade of my decription of the plants of