PREFACE. Xli 



wood ; and this fruit is formed in the space of fifty 

 or sixty days. 



The fruit falls to the ground, when ripe, with a 

 prodigious noise ; and it is thought dangerous to 

 walk in the forests at that time, from the weight 

 with which they fall from a height of fifty or sixty 

 feet. A writer of the seventeenth century says, 

 that no one could venture near them without 

 covering his head and shoulders with a buckler of 

 very hard wood. Humboldt says these bucklers 

 are not worn by the natives of Esmeralda, but that 

 they spoke of the danger they incurred. The In- 

 dians celebrate the harvest of this fruit with 

 dancing and excessive drinking*. 



Mr. Humboldt did not see this fine tree in blos- 

 som, but understood that the blossoms were violet- 

 coloured, and not produced till the tree was fifteen 

 years old. The trunk is generally two or three 

 feet in diameter, and the tree an hundred or an 

 hundred and twenty feet high. 



Independently of their own beauty, and of the 

 pleasure men take in walking or sitting in their 



* Humboldt's Personal Narrative, vol. v. p. 532, &c. 



