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voluntarily arises : 



pjllm of timbuctoo. 165 



;eadily suggest itself to anybody wishing to partake of it ; but 

 here is something peculiar in eating the seedlings, to say nothing 



of flour from them. Here the question in- 

 " Is the idea of eating them of native grovpth, 

 or has it been derived from the East Indies ? " I. am not inclined 

 to give the negroes much credit for ijiventive genius, but 1 think 

 m this instance we must assign it to them. For if the applications 

 of this palm had been adopted from the Palmyra, it is not likely 

 that the most useful one of them, the extracting of toddy for 

 making wine, vinegar, yeast, spirits and sugar, would have been 

 overlooked. But neither of the £. ? ^thioptm nor of any other 

 African palm do I find it recorded that they serve for that pur- 

 pose J all we hear is, that the date-tree in Northern Africa, after 

 the heart of its leaves has been cut out, accumulates a thick, 

 sweetish, and refreshing sap ("Lagbi"), of a slightly purgative , 

 tendency ; and that the ancient inhabitants of the Canary Islands, 

 the Guanches, knew how to prepare from it a beverage, which 



grape wine, and also vinegar, honey, and 



and 



the method by which the sap was obtained has not been handed 

 down to us : as we are informed, however, by Viera, that each 

 tree yielded about a small caskful, it is not impossible that it may 

 We been procured as it is still in Northern Africa^ and that 

 whenever sap was required, at least one tree had to be sax^rificed. 

 The extraction of toddy seems to be peculiarly Asiatic : in America 

 It is unknown, for the so-called "palm-wine '' of that country is 

 iiot obtained by means of the spadix from a Iwin^ tree, as is the 

 case with genuine toddy, but by a hole cut under the crown of a 

 tree previously felled. Thus we find that all the three continents, 

 chiefly inhabited by these princes of the vegetable kingdom, prac- 

 tise one principal method of extracting the saccharine matter in 

 ^tich many of the palms abound. Both the Africans and the 



V dest 



they procure, the Jorme 

 OT. i^TT ft^llmty its trunk 



^^y the Asiatics preserve it by merely cutting its spadix, and 



ailowina fliA a«*% +^ «^„^ ^,,4- +l^».i-iii/Tli flio wmmHfifl 



parts. The 



WaJiton destruction of the trees by the one party, and 



Ame 



Af] 



long 



of destruction is continued, will never furnish 



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annually 



Europe alone several thousand 



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