EXPLANATOEY INDEX. 379 



amount of twisting, and are much used for housebuilding. 

 They go by the name of Mamouril. Others are so brittle 

 that they snap if tied in knots or twisted. Stedman compares 

 the appearance of the tropical forest with its tall tree trunks 

 and interlacing bush-ropes to that of a fleet at anchor, a 

 comparison afterwards employed by Waterton. 



CABBAGE, Mountain (Oreodoxa oleracea). One of the most 

 beautiful of the Palms. The topmost shoot is popularly 

 called the " cabbage," and is a very excellent vegetable for 

 the table. As the palm dies when the central shoot is de- 

 stroyed, the usual plan is to cut it down, knowing that there 

 are plenty of others ready to take the place of those which 

 are destroyed. 



Kingsley well described his first sight of the Cabbage 

 Palm : 



"Grey pillars, which seemed taller than the tallest poplars, 

 smooth and cylindrical as those of a Doric temple, each 

 carrying a flat head of darkest green, were ranged along 

 roadsides and round fields, or stood in groups or singly, near 

 engine works, or towered above rich shrubberies which 

 shrouded comfortable country houses. It was not easy, as 

 I have said, to believe that these strange and noble things 

 were trees ; but such they were. At last we beheld, with 

 wonder and delight, the pride of the West Indies, the 

 Cabbage-palm Palmistes of the French settlers which 

 botanists have well named Oreodoxa, the ' glory of the 

 mountain.' 



" We saw them afterwards a hundred times in their own 

 native forests, and when they rose through tangled masses of 

 richest vegetation mixed with other and smaller species of 

 palms, their form, fantastic though it was, harmonized well 

 with hundreds of forms equally fantastic. But here they 

 seemed, at first sight, out of place, incongruous, and artificial, 

 standing amid no kindred forms, and towering over a cultiva- 

 tion and civilisation which might have been mistaken, seen 

 from the sea, for wealthy farms along some English shore. 



