THE RED CLIFFS OF DEVON. I To THY EDITOR OF
THZ "SPECTATOR."] SIB.,—In the interesting paper on " The Red Cliffs of Devon," in the Spectator of January 11th, the writer alludes to the precious finds " sometimes picked up at their base. It may be worth while to tell of one, not mentioned in the above paper, of which a full account was given by Dr. D. Morris, of Kew, in Nature, for November 21st, 1S95. In one of the smaller curves which together make up Bigbury Bay, between Yealm Head and Bolt Tail, a chance passer-by, in November, 1887, had the good luck to see in a small drift of weed and shingle on the sand, a sea-borne, unknown fruit. It was of about the size and texture of a walnut ; but instead of having only two divisions, there were five, with a neat pentagon at the top. The fruit, white and worn with long exposure te sea and sun, was shown to Professor Oliver, who recognised its identity with a few specimens that had been picked up on the coast of Jamaica, and sent to Kew; and the new find was added to the Kew collection of Drift- irnits. But although the fruit itself had been figured and described by botanists for nearly three hundred years, yet the tree bearing it remained unknown until 1889, when, by comparison with drawings made by Crilger in 1861, it was made evident that this was the fruit of Sacoglottis Amazonica, known in Trinidad, where the tree is very rare, as Cojon de Burro. The Devonshire specimen, which remains the only one found on this side of the Atlantic, now reposes in a special bottle in the No. 1 Museum in Kew Gardens; and its history is supposed to be as follows : That it grew on a tree on the borders of the Amazon River, and was brought down by flood- waters and launched in the Atlantic ; that, coasting at first along the northern shores of South America, it was borne by the circuitous course of the gulf-stream, and at last stranded in the little bay where it was found. On looking at a map one sees what admirable catching-grounds for Atlantic waifs and strays must be made by the separate cusps of that large Bigbury Bay, which, as a whole, faces south-west; and this note is written in the hope of inducing the snappers-up of unconsidered trifles to search there.—I am, Sir, &c.,
E. H.
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