36 TROPICAL NATURE, AND OTHER ESSAYS. 



best adapted to certain purposes. The wood of some is 

 light and soft, and is used for floats or for carving out 

 rude images, stools, and ornaments for boats and houses. 

 The flat slabs of the buttresses are often used to make 

 paddles. Some of the trees with furrowed stems are 

 exceedingly strong and durable, serving as posts for 

 houses or as piles on which the water-villages are built. 

 Canoes, formed from a trunk hollowed out and spread 

 open under the action of heat, require one kind of wood, 

 those built up with planks another ; and, as the species of 

 trees in these forests are so much more numerous than 

 the wants of a semi-civilized population, there are probably 

 a large number of kinds of timber which will some day 

 be found to be well adapted to the special requirements 

 of the arts and sciences. The products of the trees of 

 the equatorial forests, notwithstanding our imperfect 

 knowledge of them, are already more useful to civilized 

 man than to the indigenous inhabitants. To mention 

 only a few of those whose names are tolerably familiar 

 to us, we have such valuable woods as mahogany, teak, 

 ebony, lignum-vitse, purple-heart, iron- wood, sandal- 

 wood, and satin-wood ; such useful gums as india-rubber, 

 gutta-percha, tragacanth, copal, lac, and dammar ; such 

 dyes as are yielded by log-wood, brazil-wood, and 

 sappan-wood ; such drugs as the balsams of Capivi and 

 Tolu, camphor, benzoin, catechu or terra-japonica, caju- 

 put oil, gamboge, quinine, Angostura bark, quassia, and 

 the urari and upas poisons ; of spices we have cloves, 

 cinnamon, and nutmegs ; and of fruits, brazil-nuts, 

 tamarinds, guavas, and the valuable cacao ; while 

 residents in our tropical colonies enjoy the bread-fruit, 

 avocado-pear, custard-apple, durian, mango, mangosteen, 



