" EQUATORIAL VEGETATION 249 



high. The leaves of palms are often of immense size. 

 Those of the Manicaria saccifera of Para are thirty feet long 

 and four or five feet wide, and are not pinnate but entire 

 and very rigid. Some of the pinnate leaves are much larger, 

 those of the Raphia teedigera and Maximiliana regia being 

 both sometimes more than fifty feet long. The fan-shaped 

 leaves of other species are ten or twelve feet in diameter. 

 The trunks of palms are sometimes smooth and more or less 

 regularly ringed, but they are frequently armed with dense 

 prickles which are sometimes eight inches long. In some 

 species the leaves fall to the ground as they decay, leaving a 

 clean scar, but in most cases they are persistent, rotting 

 slowly away, and leaving a mass of fibrous stumps attached 

 to the upper part of the stem. This rotting mass forms an 

 excellent soil for ferns, orchids, and other semi -parasitical 

 plants, which form an attractive feature on what would 

 otherwise be an unsightly object. The sheathing margins of 

 the leaves often break up into a fibrous material, sometimes 

 resembling a coarse cloth, and in other cases more like horse- 

 hair. The flowers are not individually large, but form large 

 spikes or racemes, and the fruits are often beautifully scaled 

 and hang in huge bunches, which are sometimes more than a 

 load for a strong man. The climbing palms are very remark- 

 able, their tough, slender, prickly stems mounting up by means 

 of the hooked midribs of the leaves to the tops of the 

 loftiest forest trees, above which they send up an elegant 

 spike of foliage and flowers. The most important are the 

 American Desmoncus and the Eastern Calamus, the latter 

 being the well-known rattan or cane of which chair-seats are 

 made, from the Malay name " rotang." The rattan-palms 

 are the largest and most remarkable of the climbing group. 

 They are very abundant in the drier equatorial forests, and 

 more than sixty species are known from the Malay Archi- 

 pelago. The stems (when cleaned from the sheathing leaves 

 and prickles) vary in size, from the thickness of a quill to 

 that of the wrist; and where abundant they render the 

 forest almost impassable. They lie about the ground coiled 

 and twisted and looped in the most fantastic manner. They 

 hang in festoons from trees and branches, they rise suddenly 

 through mid air up to the top of the forest, or coil loosely 



