The Palms. 9& 



before y©n the principal outlines of the forms of these plants. I will also 

 mention the architectonic relation of their internal structure, their distri- 

 bution and their propagation, their relation to the human race, their influ- 

 ence on the physical and moral energies of mankind, or, briefly, their his-- 

 toric mission in nature. 



Few plants have more impressively influenced the welfare or woe of 

 whole nations, and are still influencing them, few have more powerfully 

 united in sisterly union the ideas of whole tribes, and more deeply founded 

 an independent direction of thought, than have the palms. Few men have 

 reflected how the palms have proved at once the motives to profound think- 

 ing on the symbolism of a religious culture, and on some of the glories of 

 artistic production. 



Tne great father of systematic botany, the immortal Linnseus, called the 

 palms the princes of the vegetable kingdom. By this he has created an 

 image of palms which will remain everlasting, for there is no better verbal 

 mode of distinguishing the palm from all other plants. Wherever the palm 

 appears in its truly typic and unstunted form, it distinguishes itself by its 

 port and carriage from all growing around. The undivided stem, which 

 rises continually in height, without bearing limbs, and lifts its crown of 

 leaves proudly up without ever dropping them, imprints on the palm it& 

 peculiar stamp. 



Some of our tallest palms delight to stand isolated, and to govern the 

 landscape for a great distance. They like to raise above the surrounding 

 jungles their heads, bathed in the sunlight, where they form, as Humboldt 

 says, a forest above the forest. Yet it must not be hastily inferred that it 

 any the less presents vast bodies of glorious fronds to contemplation. Sir 

 Samuel W. Baker, who spent many years in the island, says : " For upwards of 

 a hundred and twenty miles along the western and southern coasts of Ceylon 

 one continuous line of cocoa-nut groves wave their green leaves to the sea 

 breeze without a break, except where some broad, clear river cleaves the 

 line of verdure as it meets the sea." At the same time, what he elsewhere 

 says is not to be forgotten : " This palm delights in the sea breeze, and never 

 attains the same perfection inland that it does in the vicinity of the coast. "^ 

 More definitely other authors affirm that this body of Cocos nucifera is 

 twenty-six leagues long and several leagues broad, and comprehends some 

 11 000,000 trees. But it is chiefly the dwarf palms which grow in grei.t 

 masses. The Sabal, Adansonii and Serrulata and the Chamserops hystrix 

 form almost impenetrable thickets as undergrowth in the swampy foret^ts of 

 lower Louisiana and Florida, and the Chamterops humilis has taken posses- 

 sion of large tracts of land in the French province of Algiers, to the exclusion of 

 all other plants, and is the despair of the colonist who tries to clear the land 

 for cultivation. In the marshy parts of the Philippines and other large 

 islands near them, and the Moluccas, there are wide tracts entirely covered 

 with the Nipa palm {Nipa frutescens). Among other social dwarf palms 



