NATURALIST IN BRAZIL 



From a pond comes a sound as though iron rods were being 

 thrown down in a heap: the music of the "Alarm frog." Now fields 

 appear, fenced here and there with dark green aloes. Other species 

 of this plant — whose succulent, thick, green sharp-pointed leaves 

 have a very tropical appearance — are cultivated. Their leaves yield 

 a textile fibre. Here and there an aloe or agave sends up a stem like 

 a mast, the top of which bears the chandelier-like inflorescence 

 (Fig. 8). This inflorescence, in shape not unlike a pine-tree, looks 

 like an independent plant, and one would hardly credit the tuft 

 of leaves on the ground with the power to produce such a tree. 

 But the agave prepares itself all its life — which, according to the 



climate and the soil, may be from five to 

 fifteen years — for this supreme achievement. 

 The energy accumulated during these years 

 is expended in lifting this inflorescence to a 

 height of thirty feet or more from the ground. 

 By the time it is fully developed the strength 

 of the plant is exhausted; it withers, and 

 presently only the inflorescence is left alive, 

 and this too collapses after the fruit has 

 ripened. It was formerly believed that the 

 agave required a hundred years to produce 

 its inflorescence, but we know now that it 

 is not the agave but the Talipot palm of 

 Ceylon that needs this long time of pre- 

 paration. With its fan-shaped leaves, which 

 are so large that one of them, bent into shape, 

 will serve as a tent, this palm grows taller 

 and taller as the thick stem rises from the ground and lifts its crown 

 high into the air. So it stands, the queen of the Indian palms, its 

 mighty fans glistening in the sun, waiting for its coronation. And 

 now an inflorescence that seems to be carved in ivory shoots up 

 from its summit. With this the vital energy of the tree is exhausted, 

 the leaves droop, and the palm dies. In the animal kingdom too 

 there is sometimes death at the summit of life. The male bee, the 

 drone, dies on uniting with the queen, high up in the sunny air. 

 In the case of the eel it is the female whose life ends even as she 

 multiplies life : a subject which might well inspire a poet. In the 

 rivers of Europe the eel — but only the female fish — lives for seven 

 to fifteen years; a voracious eater. Then suddenly a change comes 

 over the eel. In the grip of an overwhelming instinct, which bids 

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Fig. 8. — Agave in bloom. 

 In the background Silk- 

 cotton trees, and a Rhea 



