388 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



turned on a lathe, tapering from base to summit and crowned by 

 clusters of plumy fronds more than a hundred feet from the ground. 

 J do not know just how old these trees are, but a hundred years or so, 

 1 have been told; nor how tall they are, but that one can see for him- 

 self; and the height is certainly impressive. The kind of palms form- 

 ing this particular avenue (Oreodoxa oleracea) has been extensively 

 planted in parks and in public and large private grounds since the 

 stately groups at the Botanical Gardens came to be appreciated more 

 than half a century ago. To-day these trees are to be seen in most of 

 the capitals and larger cities all over Brazil. 



But the Brazilians think of palms more seriously as useful in other 

 ways than as landscape ornaments. Indeed, to the traveler in the 

 interior of Brazil, one of the most striking things about palms is the 

 great number of uses to which they are put, uses extending to all parts 

 of the plant. It is a matter of great importance in the tropics that 

 plants bear their fruits and yield their other products with but little 

 or no labor on the part of man, and this the palms all do. To mention 

 all their uses in a short article is quite impossible. It is said of the 

 coco* palm, for instance, that it has a use for every day in the year, 

 and whether this be true or not, it is near enough the truth to illustrate 

 the point; and it is no extravagant statement of its virtues. Out of 

 more than a hundred species of Brazilian palms upon which I made 

 notes there is hardly one that has not some special and important use. 



To the casual observer it might appear that palms are plants of 

 such marked characters that there would be no difficulty in distinguish- 

 ing the species. At least that was my own impression when I first 

 walked through an Amazonian forest and observed the apparently 

 wide differences between them. But as one's acquaintance with palms 

 widens he finds them to be very like other organisms in their similari- 

 ties and dissimilarities. 



The Palm Trunk. — Palms vary enormously in size, shape, habit and 

 habitat. The largest are the royal palms which reach a height of 

 nearly two hundred feet with a perfectly straight, smooth and 

 symmetrically tapering trunk over a meter in diameter at the base. 

 The smallest are the Geonomas and certain species of Bactris, slender 

 delicate plants but little more than a meter in height, with a trunk 

 not larger than an ordinary lead pencil. Still others have no trunks at 

 all above the ground, but the leaves and fruits rise from a short stock 

 concealed beneath the soil very like a bulb. 



The jacitdra (Desmoncus) has a trunk the size of a man's finger and 

 a length of a hundred feet or more, a form that is unable to stand 

 erect, but sprawls or clambers over other plants like a vine. Some 



* Coco, not cocoa, is the correct form of this word. 



