duty of maintaining a consecutive, unbroken series which defies the
mechanism of cold countries with their cast-iron calendars.

Here but three or four trees deign to recognise the cool season by the
shedding of their leaves. FICUS CUNNINGHAMI discards--by no means
consistently--its foliage in obedience to some spasmodic impulse, when the
many thin branches, thick-strewn with pink fruit, stand out against the
sky as aerial coral, fantastically dyed. But in two or three days
burnished brown leaves burst from the embraces of elongated buds which,
rejected, fall--pink phylacteries--to decorate the sand, while in
a week the tree wears a new and glistening garment of green. The
flame-tree (ERYTHRINA INDICA) slowly abandons its foliage; but before the
last yellow-green leaf is cast aside the fringe of the blood-red robe soon
to overspread has appeared. The white cedar (MELIA CONFERTA) permits its
leaves to become yellow and to fall lingeringly, but its bareness is
merely for a week or so. So also does the foliage of the moo-jee
(TERMINALIA MELANOCARPA) turn to deepest red and is discarded, but so
orderly is the disrobing and the never varying fashion of foliage that
the tree averts the scorn of the most respectable of neighbours.

Month after month of warm days and plenteous rain during the early part
of 1909 produced an effect in the acacias which cannot be too thankfully
recorded. The blooming season extended from March 29th to July 17th,
beginning with ACACIA CUNNINHHAMI and ending with the third flush of A.
AULACOCARPA. During a third of the year whiffs of the delicious perfume
of the wattle were never absent, for two flushes of A. FLAVESCENS filled
in the brief intervals between those of AULACOCARPA. This latter, the
commonest of the species on the island, produces its flowers in long
spikes in the axils of the leaves on the minor branches, weighting such
branches with semi-pendulous plumes laden with haunting perfume. The