THE PALM TREES OF BRAZIL. 



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palm trunks are smooth while others are thickly covered with repulsive 

 spines often of enormous size, and still others are clothed with mats 

 of long tough fiber resembling masses of tangled and broken twine. 



Certain species have trunks of uneven size, swollen here or there. 

 These bellied palms, as they are called in Brazil, usually have the swollen 

 part at some fixed place in the trunk. This is true of the paxiuha 

 barrigiida (Iriartea ventricosa) and of the Acrocomia, but at Assuncion, 

 Paraguay, I found the swollen portions of the trunk of a palm locally 

 called Bocadja now near the base and now near the summit and 

 another time near the middle. Some palm trunks are as smooth as if 

 tooled, others, like the coco, are more or less ribbed. These ribs run 

 round the trunk, and on some trees they are so close together that the 

 whole trunk is notched with them. The ribs are really only leaf scars. 



Fig. 2. A Trunkless Palm (Astrocaryum humilis C); Fkuit Natural Size. 



and on some species they are so far apart that the stems appear to be 

 jointed like a bamboo. The ribbed trunks and smooth trunks, how- 

 ever, are noticeable only on palms that shed their fronds freely after 

 they mature. In some cases the petiole breaks ofE two or three feet from 

 the trunk, leaving it bristling with the jagged stumps of the petioles. 

 In the accompanying illustration of the jupaty it will be seen that 

 both conditions sometimes prevail with the same species. 



Some trunks are thickly covered with spines. These spines vary in 

 size from a few millimeters to half a meter in length. They seldom 

 grow on the leaf scars, but usually cover the spaces between them. 



Palm trunks may be either straight or crooked, but the habit of a 

 species in this respect is pretty constant. For instance, the royal palm 



