The Palms. 103 



high degree. Strong old palm trees bend in the wind far below the line in 

 which our forest trees could retain their entirety, while young trees are as 

 yielding and pliable as grass halms. The stems of our trees would break if 

 they were bent as much as any of them. Headless trunks, or forest giants 

 broken and uprooted by the storm, as we meet them in our forests, are un- 

 known in the world of palms. The palm remains standing erect when the 

 tropical hurricane shivers the forest around him to pieces, and when other 

 trees are broken asunder. The deficiency of a woody body, as in our trees, 

 does not withdraw from the palm that degree of solidity and hardness which 

 ii indispensable to it to maintain its position, and to brave the attacks of 

 storms. Its solidity is, on the contrar}-^, a very extraordinary one. The 

 wood of certain palms belongs to the hardest we know. The best ax is notched 

 or gets its edge turned in attempts to cut some of them, as the Guilielma 

 speciosa or peach palm of Venezuela and Guiana. 



On the high shaft of the tree palm, as well as on the climbing stem 

 which winds itself through the thickets of the forest, the palm unfolds its 

 crown of leaves. On the arborescent palm it corresponds with the architec- 

 tonic capital. Some palm leaves resemble long drawn out spades, as in the 

 Lodoicea and Phoeaicophorium Sechellarum and Verschafleltia sporida, in 

 which they are sometimes upward of twenty feet long and twelve feet wide. 

 Others may be compared with the leaves of our parsley, only magnified a 

 hundred-fold, as in the Caryota^ and Martinezia caryotifolia. But the two 

 principal forms are the fan-leaved and the pinnate-leaved palms. The fan- 

 leaved carry green fans, the pinnate-leaved green feathers. A lady's fan, 

 whose rays are drawn out in long points, gives us an image of the fan leaf, 

 and an ostrich feather, which we have to imagine immensely lengthened, 

 and its downy divisions put further apart and transformed into green leaves, 

 gives us an idea of the pinnate palm leaf. Of the fan-leaved palms we have 

 in the United States the Sabal palmetto, the S. Adansonii, S. serrulata and 

 the Chamserops hystrix. 



In the formation of the palm leaf the structure of the leaves celebrates 

 its triumphs, for no larger leaves are met with in the vegetable kingdom. 

 It seems as if nature intended to indemnify the palms for the deficiency of 

 a crown of branches by the grandeur of the organs of the leaves, so gigan- 

 tically and massively are they built. There are palm leaves which fairly vie 

 in size with many of our fruit trees. Put up in our orchards they would 

 reach far above the tops of the trees. The leaves of the Jupati palm (Raphia 

 txdigera), a pinnate-leaved palm of Brazil, attain a length of sixty feet or 

 more, and form a feather crown of forty feet in diameter. Its leaf stalk or 

 petiole shoots out twelve to fifteen feet before the first segments of the 

 leaf make ther appearance. We could easily climb up to the second story 

 of our houses on the prongs of the leaf stalk of the Sagus or the Arenga 

 palm {A. saccliarifera). No less majestic are the fan leaves of those palms 

 which, though not so Jong, spread more in breadth. The round green fan 

 leaves hover about the head of the palm, and when shaken by the wind send 



