CHAPTER XIII 



sends out from the top an inflorescence forty feet high and thirty-five 

 in diameter ; after maturing the fruit from this cluster, the Talipot, 

 like the century plant, dies. But there are other palms that mature 

 great abundance of fruit every year. The cocoa nut palm, now culti- 

 vated throughout the tropics, yields from one hundred to one hun- 

 dred and fifty nuts a year for perhaps forty years. The fruit of the 

 date palm constitutes the main food of the inhabitants of the Arabian 

 and African deserts. Sometimes the main food supply is stored in the 

 trunk of the palm ; in the East Indies the pith of a sago palm fifteen 

 years old has been known to supply eight hundred pounds of sago. 

 The fruits of a West African palm supply the palm oil of commerce ; 

 the nuts of others furnish a substitute for ivory ; several kinds of 

 palms have their young leaves coated with a wax of commercial value, 

 and so on. The multitudinous uses the natives find for cocoa palms 

 can be looked up, as suggested in the Reader, and are sure to interest 

 children. Palms have been known to attain a height of one hundred 

 and eighty feet, but the greatest measurement attained is by some 

 of the climbing palms ; Kerner says that a length of six hundred feet 

 has been recorded. 



There are thirty-five hundred species of grasses, and some of the 

 species are so very widely cultivated that this number fails to indicate 

 the importance of the family. Family traits are easily seen. The 

 leaves are linear and have sheathing bases ; the stems are jointed, and 

 in most species are hollow between the joints ; the flowers, when 

 perfect, have usually three stamens and two very feathery stigmas, 

 but many grasses besides the corn have unisexual flowers. The 

 flowers rarely show traces of a perianth, and the usual arrangement of 

 bracts surrounding them can be easily seen in the wild oats, or in the 

 staminate flowers of the corn. An inner bract very closely invests the 

 flower and an outer bract nearly envelopes this flower and the inner 

 bract ; finally two or three flowers, or florets, with their bracts are 

 together enclosed in another pair of bracts called the glumes ; these 

 groups, called spikelets, are clustered in various ways ; they form a 

 panicle in oats, a spike in barley, and so on. The root system of the 

 corn seedling, Chapter II, is typical of annual grasses. In tropical 

 countries some grasses, like the bamboo, have perennial stems that 

 attain the height of trees ; the bamboo is sometimes seventy-five feet 

 high. In temperate climates the vertical stems of most perennial 

 grasses, unless artificially treated, die down annually, only the long 

 horizontal stems, above of below ground, being perennial ; Bermuda 

 grass and the Kentucky blue grass of our lawns are examples, also 

 the perennial grasses that persist in our moist alkali lands. 



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