COMMON DATE-PALM. 421 



their saccharine juices are often fermented, so as to form a 

 spirit called arrack, or palm-wine called toddy. 



Areca catechu furnishes the pinang or betel-nut used all 

 over the East as a masticatory, the nut being wrapt in the 

 leaf of a plant of the pepper tribe, Chavica betle. A. oleracea, 

 West India cabbage-palm, is boiled as an esculent vegetable. 

 Astrocaryum murumuru has fruit which is edible. Caryota 

 urens is one of the palms that furnish sugar as well as the 

 fermentable fluid called toddy. Cocos nucifera, the cocoa-nut 

 palm. The sugar it supplies is called jaggery. Toddy is ob- 

 tained by slicing its spadix. Euterpe montana, the mountain 

 cabbage-palm, affords young leaf-buds in use as an esculent 

 vegetable. E. edulis, assai, or assai zeiro, yields a pulpy 

 fruit, from which a grateful beverage is prepared. Hyphccnc 

 thebaica, the doom palm of Egypt, has a fruit, the pericarp of 

 which has the taste of gingerbread, and is edible. Lodoicea 

 Seychellarum, a palm of the Seychelles Islands, produces the 

 fruit called the double cocoa-nut. Mauritia mnifera, the 

 Muriti palm, and M. flexuosa, yield a kind of palm-wine. 

 Metroxylon Iceve, a native of Borneo and Sumatra, is one of the 

 sources of sago. Phoenix dactylifera, the date-palm, is a 

 native of the northern parts of Africa, Arabia, and the adjacent 

 regions of Turkey in Asia. The fruit of this tree, the com- 

 mon date, is imported into Britain from Barbary and Egypt, 

 being usually of the variety called Tafilat. It is said there are 

 forty-six varieties of dates cultivated in the oasis of Fezzan. 

 Richardson says that 19-20ths of the population of Fezzan 

 in Africa live on dates during nine months in the year, and 

 that many of the animals are also fed on them. The fruit 

 of this tree makes a great part of the diet of the inhabitants of 

 Arabia, part of Persia and Upper Egypt, and many families 

 subsist almost entirely on it. They make a conserve of it 

 with sugar, and for their camels grind even its hard stones in 



