DESCRIPTION OF SPECIES— PALM^, 109 



sification of all the so-called Carpolithes, whose relation to Palms seems 

 evident. The fruits attached to a Palm leaf, and apparently referable to the 

 same species, are described under the same specific name as the frond. 



The Palms, those "noble children of the earth and of the sun", as Martius 

 names them, mostly inhabit the intertropical regions of the globe. They live 

 in the humid bottoms of the equatorial rivers, of the Amazon especially, on 

 the shores of the oceans, sometimes upon the slopes of high mountains, either 

 in dense forests or solitary, or, perhaps, grouped a few together, in vast plains 

 deprived of any other kind of arborescent vegetation. In the North American 

 continent, they do not pass above the 34° of north latitude, following the same 

 distribution upon the Atlantic and the Pacific slopes. In Europe, they reach 

 the 43°; in the southern hemisphere, the 36°. The northern species, Cha- 

 iHcBvops, or Sabal, are of small size, and, though elegant in their form, scarcely 

 give an idea of the splendid, graceful shape, and of the enormous develop- 

 ment, which impart to the vegetation of the tropics a character of magnificence 

 and grandeur of which no description, no representation, may give a just idea. 

 Trunks of Palms oC less than oiic foot in diameter, cylindrical, simple, or clear 

 of any branches, bear, one hundred feet and more above ground, their crowns 

 of leaves, sometimes resembling fans, of such a size that one of them is large 

 enough to cover and wall in the habitation of a whole family. The shape 

 of these leaves, though most diversified, is always strikingly beautiful. 



In the geological times, the Palms appear in the Cretaceous, wherefrom 

 one or two species have been described in Europe. They become more pre- 

 dominant in the Tertiary, being already abundant in the Eocene period, where 

 European paleontologists have discovered twenty-one species; and still more 

 predominant in the Miocene, from which forty-two species are described, 

 mostly from its lower divisions and from the South of Europe. No remains 

 of Palms have been until now recognized in geological formations of Europe 

 above 52° north. Heer has described none from the Baltic Miocene flora 

 and none from the Arctic. In North America, there is an indistinct trace 

 of the presence of Palms in the Cretaceous of Nebraska, by small fragments 

 of striated leaves, described as Ftabellarial minima. In the Lower Lignitic 

 Eocene, immediately at the top of the Cretaceous Measures, the Palms are 

 already extremely abundant at Point of Rocks, at Black Buttes, and still more 

 at Grolden, where the Eocene facies of the flora is marked, as in Europe, by 

 a profusion of remains of trunks, mostly silicified, and thus distinctly pre- 



