A glance at the excellent enumerations of the uses of vegetable products to be found in Lindley's Vegetable Kingdom (a monument of learning) will show how God provides, how man neglects and wastes.

As a single instance, the Laurels alone are known already to contain several valuable febrifuges, among which the Demerara Greenheart, or Bibiri, {266b} claims perhaps the highest rank.

'Dr.Maclagan has shown,' says Dr.Lindley, 'that sulphate of Bibiri acts with rapid and complete success in arresting ague.' This tree spreads from Jamaica to the Spanish Main.

It is plentiful in Trinidad; still more plentiful in Guiana; and yet all of it which reaches Europe is a little of its hard beautiful wood for the use of cabinetmakers; while in Demerara, I am assured by an eye-witness, many tons of this precious Greenheart bark are thrown away year by year.

So goes the world; and man meanwhile at once boasts of his civilisation, and complains of the niggardliness of Nature.
But if I once begin on this subject I shall not know where to end.
Our way lay now for miles along a path which justified all that I had fancied about the magnificent possibilities of landscape gardening in the Tropics.