300 VIEWS, &C. PHYSIOGNOMY OF PLANTS. 



ence of the natives provokes the European so much the more, 

 from his being continually a witness of the inconceivable 

 agility with which they will climb any height when prompted 

 by their own inclination, as, for instance, in the pursuit of a 

 parrot, an iguana, or a monkey, which, wounded by their 

 arrows, saves itself from falling by its prehensile tail. In the 

 month of January the stems of the Palma Real, our Oreo- 

 doxa Regia, were covered with snow-white blossoms, in all 

 the most frequented thoroughfares of the Havannah, and in 

 the immediate vicinity of the city ; but, although we offered, 

 for several days running, a couple of piastres for a single 

 spadix of the hermaphrodite blossoms to every negro boy 

 we met in the streets of Regla and Guanavacoa, it was in 

 vain, for, in the tropics, no free man will ever undertake 

 any labour attended by fatigue unless he is compelled to do 

 so by imperative necessity ! The botanists and painters of the 

 Royal Spanish Commission of Natural History under Count 

 Don Jaruco y Mopox (Estevez, Boldo, Guio, Echeveria), con- 

 fessed to us that, for several years, they had been unable to 

 examine these blossoms, owing to the absolute impossibility 

 of obtaining them. 



" After this statement of the difficulties attending their 

 acquisition, the fact of our being only able, in the course of 

 two years, systematically to describe twelve species of palms, 

 although we had discovered twenty species, may be under- 

 stood; but I confess it would hardly have been credible to me 

 before I left Europe. How interesting a work might be 

 written on palms by a traveller, who could exclusively devote 

 himself to the delineation, in their natural size, of the spathe, 

 spadix, inflorescence and fruits!" (Thus I wrote many years 

 before the Brazilian travels of Martius and Spix, and the 

 appearance of the admirable work on Palms by the former.) 



*' There is much sameness in the form of the leaves, which 

 are either feathery (pinnata), or fanlike (palmo-digitata) ; the 

 leaf-stalk (petiolus) is either without thorns or is sharply ser- 

 rated (serrato-spinosus) . The leaf-form of Caryota urens and 

 Martinezia caryotifolia, which we saw on the banks of the 

 Orinoco and the Atabapo, and subsequently in the Andes, at 

 the pass of Quindiu, as high as 3200 feet above the level of 

 the sea, is almost as peculiar among palms as is the leaf-form 

 of the Gingko among trees. The habitus and Dhysiognomy of 



