-18° 30′ N., long. 65° 39-67° 11′ W. It is in size somewhat less than Jamaica, being fully 100 miles from east to west, 40 miles from north to south, and closely resembling a rectangle in shape. The island is traversed from east to west by a range of mountains, 1500 feet in average height, though rising in one peak to 3678 feet above the sea. From the base of the mountains, rich alluvial tracts extend to the sea, and there are numerous

PUERTO DE SANTA MARI'A (usually called EL PUERTO, the Port), a seaport of Spain, in the well-wooded and abundantly watered valleys. The soil is remarkably fertile. The principal crops modern province of Cadiz, stands at the mouth of the Guadalete, in a most fertile district, on the Bay and cotton remarkable for its length of fibre, are sugar, coffee, and tobacco of the finest quality, of Cadiz, 6 miles north-east of the city of that Cattle and sheep are name, and 9 miles by railway south-west of Xeres. tenacity, and whiteness. Suspension-bridges cross the Guadalete and the Rio extensively reared, of a quality superior to any de S. Pedro. The mouth of the Guadalete forms others in the West Indies. The imports consist of the harbour; but the bar is dangerous and much cotton, woollen, linen, silk, and embroidered goods, neglected. P., a pleasant and well-built town, fruits, wines, &c. The exports are sugar, tobacco, metals, hardware, and provisions, as ale, porter, resembling Cadiz in its houses, and containing only coffee, cotton, molasses, rum, hides, and cattle. one long and handsome street, while the others are The chief ports are San Juan, commonly called narrow and ill paved, is the port for the shipment Puerto Rico, in the north-east, Ponce in the of Xeres wines. The wines are lodged in numerous bodegas, or wine-stores, lofty buildings built with south-west, and Mayaguez in the west. thick walls and narrow windows, in order to secure West Indies. Area, 3897 sq. m.; pop. 700,000, of one of the coolest and healthiest places in the an even temperature inside. From this port about whom the majority are whites, and of the coloured 1,530,000 gallons of Xeres wines are exported to foreign lands, and about 26,000 gallons are trans-race not more than 35,000 are slaves. The island ported inland. The bull-fights which take place produces 100,000 tons of sugar yearly. The British here in May are among the most famous in the consul, in a recent report, estimates the whole country. Steamers ply three times a day between produce at 20,000,000 dollars, the exports (for this town and Cadiz, and P. supplies that city with 1868) at £2,500,000, and the imports at nearly the drinking-water at a cost of £10,000 a year. Pop. Great Britain, but owing to high differential duties A great portion of the trade is with and port charges, it is carried on in Spanish bottoms.

about 18,000.

PUERTO PRINCIPÉ, SANTA MARIA DE, an important inland town, in the east of the island of Cuba, about 325 miles east-south-east of Havana, and 45 miles south-west of its port, Las Nuevitas, with which it is connected by railway. Pop. 30,000. PUERTO RICO, an island in the West Indies, belonging to Spain, is one of the Greater Antilles, and lies west of Hayti or St Domingo, lat. 17° 55'

same amount.

P. R. is

The libreta system, by which every labourer, whether white or coloured, is obliged to shew from time to time that he is getting his living honestly, is described as operating most beneficially. Every labourer must, at the beginning of the month, present his libreta, or journal, for the preceding month, containing certificates from his employers

365

PUFF-ADDER-PUFFIN.

of the number of days that he has worked; and for all not thus accounted for, he must work upon the roads at sixpence a day-excepting, of course, cases of ill health. In consequence of this, there is no necessity for the importation of coolies or other labourers, the slave-trade is extinct, slavery is dying out, the island is prosperous, and there is a comparative absence of crime.

Puff-adder (Clotho arietans).

to the removal of the honey, but have been used as an anæsthetic instead of chloroform. The same properties belong also to other species. Some of them, in a young state, are used in some countries as food, and none of them is known to be poisonous. PUFF-BIRD. See BARBET.

PUFFENDORF, SAMUEL, son of a Lutheran clergyman, was born in 1632 at Chemnitz, in PUFF-ADDER (Clotho arietans), a serpent of Saxony. He received the early part of his educathe family Viperidae, having a short and broad flat tion at Grimma; whence he removed to the head, with scales so sharply keeled as to end in university of Leipzig. There he studied theology a kind of spine. It is one of the most venomous for several years. In 1656 he went to the university and dangerous serpents of South Africa. It attains of Jena, where he seems to have devoted himself a length of four or almost five feet, and is thick in at first chiefly to mathematics, and subsequently to proportion to its length, often as thick as a man's the study of the Law of Nature, as he, and others arm. Its head is very broad; its tail suddenly who have treated on the same subject, have tapered; its colour brown, chequered with dark termed the law which regulates the duties of men to one another, independent of the mutual obligation which is enforced by political government, or by revelation of divine will. After quitting Jena, he was appointed tutor to the son of the Swedish ambassador at Copenhagen. Soon after he had received this appointment, a rupture having taken place between Denmark and Sweden, P. was detained as a prisoner in the Danish capital. The power, of his mind here shewed itself in a remarkable manner. Deprived of books and of society, he threw himself vigorously into meditating on what he had formerly read in the treatise of Grotius, De Jure Belli et Pacis, and in the writings of Hobbes on the principles of general law. The result was the production of the Elementa Jurisprudentia Universalis -a work which was the foundation of its author's fortune. It was dedicated to the Elector Palatine; and by this prince, P. was appointed to the Professorship of the Law of Nature and Nations at the university of Heidelberg. He now gave his attention to the tissue of absurdities which existed in the constitution of the Germanic Empire. As was to have been expected, the work (De Statu Reipublicae Germanicae, 1667), in which he exposed the defects of the system, raised a storm of controversy. Austria was especially furious. P. had taken care to publish it under a pseudonym-that of Severinus a Mozambano, but still, to avoid the possible consequences, he accepted an invitation from Charles XI. of Sweden, in 1670, to become Professor of the Law of Nations at Lund. During his residence there, he published the work on which his fame now principally rests, De Jure Naturæ et Gentium. He then removed to Stockholm, where the king of Sweden made him his historiographer, with the character, he published a very uninteresting history dignity of a counsellor of state. In his official of Sweden, from the expedition of Gustavus Adolphus into Germany to the death of Queen Christine. Berlin to write the history of his life and reign. P. In 1688, the Elector of Brandenburg invited him to accepted the invitation, and executed the required work in 19 dreary volumes. His intention was to have returned to Stockholm, but death overtook P. lacked the genius to him at Berlin in 1694. render the subjects on which he wrote generally interesting, but his intellectual power was nevertheless very considerable, and it appears to have throughout been honestly exercised and with unflagging industry.-See Jenisch's Vita Pufen dorfii in the Memoirs of the Academy of Stockholm,

brown and white; a reddish band between the eyes; the under parts paler than the upper. Its movements are generally slow, but it turns very quickly if approached from behind. It usually creeps partially immersed in the sand of the South African deserts, its head alone being completely raised above ground. When irritated, it puffs out the upper part of its body, whence its name. The P. is easily killed by the oil, or even by the juice of tobacco. Its poison is used by the Bosjesmans for their arrows.-South Africa produces several other species of Clotho, similar in their habits to the P., and almost equally dangerous.

PUFFBALL (Lycoperdon), a Linnæan genus of Fungi, now divided into many genera, belonging to the section Gasteromycetes, and to the tribe Trichospermi. They mostly grow on the ground, and are roundish, generally without a stem, at first firm and fleshy, but afterwards powdery within; the powder consisting of the spores, among which are many fine filaments, loosely filling the interior of the peridium, or external membrane. The peridium finally bursts at the top, to allow the escape of the spores, which issue from it as very fine dust. Some of the species are common everywhere. Most of them affect rather dry soils, and some are found only in heaths and sandy soils. The most common British species is L. gemmatum, generally from one to two and a half inches in diameter, with a warty and mealy surface. The largest British species, the GIANT P. (L. giganteum), is often many feet in circumference, and filled with a loathsome pulpy mass, when young; but in its mature state, its contents are so dry and spongy that they have often been used for stanching wounds. Their fumes, when burned, have not only the power of stupifying bees, for which they are sometimes used, in order

1802.

PUFFIN (Fratercula), a genus of birds of the Auk (q. v.) family, Alcade, having the bill shorter than the head, very much compressed, its height at the base equal to its length, the ridge of the upper mandible as high as the top of the head, both mandibles arched, and transversely grooved. The