The sulphur and purple Neerembergia of our hothouses, which is here one mass of flower at Christmas, and the creeping Crab's-eye Vine, {314g} will scramble over the fence; while, as a finish to his little Paradise, he will have planted at each of its four corners an upright Dragon's-blood {314h} bush, whose violet and red leaves bedeck our dinner-tables in winter; and are here used, from their unlikeness to any other plant in the island, to mark boundaries.
I have not dared--for fear of prolixity--to make this catalogue as complete as I could have done.

But it must be remembered that, over and above all this, every hedge and wood furnishes wild fruit more or less eatable; the high forests plenty of oily seeds, in which the tropic man delights; and woods, forests, and fields medicinal plants uncounted.

'There is more medicine in the bush, and better, than in all the shops in Port of Spain,' said a wise medical man to me; and to the Exhibition of 1862 Mr.M'Clintock alone contributed, from British Guiana, one hundred and forty species of barks used as medicine by the Indians.

There is therefore no fear that the tropical small farmer should suffer, either from want, or from monotony of food; and equally small fear lest, when his children have eaten themselves sick--as they are likely to do if, like the Negro children, they are eating all day long--he should be unable to find something in the hedge which will set them all right again.
At the amount of food which a man can get off this little patch I dare not guess.

Well says Humboldt, that an European lately arrived in the torrid zone is struck with nothing so much as the extreme smallness of the spots under cultivation round a cabin which contains a numerous family.