NOTICES OF BOOKS. 91 



impossibility of preserving the gigantic leaves, flowers, and fruits, for 

 the herbarium or museum and home study, the few scientific travellers 

 that can describe them in loco natali, and the difficulties that even 

 such have to contend with in procuring samples* and in the study 

 of them, must greatly retard the progress of our knowledge of them; 

 w^hile, with regard to the enumeration of those in cultivation, the in- 

 creased and increasing rage for multiplying species, whether from a 

 love of notoriety in the attaching an author's name to a species, or 

 from a love of lucre in the ready disposal of a plant with a new name, 

 little dependence can be placed on our garden Catalogues, The amount 

 of information on the useful history of Palms here collected is very 

 great, and is most creditable to the author's researches and to his own 

 personal observations during his extensive travels. All that is curious 

 and remarkable, all that concerns the uses and properties of Palms, is 

 here related in an agreeable manner; and so notorious are these, that 

 the utility of Palms has become almost a proverb, as Mr. George Her- 

 bert has it in his poem entitled " Providence :" — 



" Sometunes Thou dost divide Thy gifts to man. 

 Sometimes unite. The Indian nut alone 

 Is clotliing, meat and trencher, drink and cann. 

 Boat, cable, sail, and needle, all in one." 



There is therefore no lack of interest in this subject. The account 

 of the Areca^ or Betel-nut; the Arenga saccJiarifera ; Attalea funifei^a^ 

 which yields a vast amount of one of the so-called Piassaba fibres, and 

 the nuts for handles of bell-pulls, etc., and the Attalea Cohnne, afford- 

 ing Cohune-oil ; ^t Borami& fiahelliformis, o"^ ^v\m-^x^ Palm, second 

 in value only perhaps to the Cocoa-nut; the Copernicia cerifera, or Bra- 

 zilian Wax-Palm, whose trunk, beset with spiral knobs, is clothed with 

 a natural vegetable wax ; Calarnus, yielding the Eattans; ChannErops 

 (dwarf Palm), which, together with the well-known Date {Pkmiix dm- 

 tylifera\^xt among the few extratropical Palms; the Doum Palm of 

 ^^y^{ {UyplKsne Thebaica), remarkable for its branching stem and for its 



* Humboldt especially allndes to the difficulty and almost impossibility of pro- 

 curing the flowers of many species, for dramng or preservation ; but Seemann ndi- 

 cules any notion of difficulty, observing that the learned author has omitted to mention 

 that some botanists have it perfectly in their power to obtam the blossoms, viz. by 

 climbing the trees » We should be sorry to make the attempt ourselves, or even to 

 see Dr. Seemann climbing the trunks of the "Prickly Pole" {Jcroconna acfea^a) 

 and not a few others described as "clothed with spmes of greater or lesser length 

 and thickness." 



