352 VEGETABLE SUBSTANCES. 



brance of that more glorious victory, when the Saviour 

 rode into Jerusalem amid the jubilations and hosan- 

 nahs of the people. 



And the tree is not unworthy of those honours 

 which mankind have in all ages bestowed upon it. 

 Indeed, the worthiness of the tree must have been 

 the cause of those honours. Rearing its stem, and 

 expanding its broad and beautiful shade where there 

 is nothing else to shelter man from the burning rays 

 of the sun, the palm-tree is hailed by the wanderer in 

 the desert with more pleasure than he hails any other 

 tree in any other situation. Nor is it for its shade 

 alone, or even for its fruit, that the palm is so desir- 

 able in that country; for wherever a little clump of 

 palms contrast their bright green with the red wilder- 

 ness around, the traveller may in general be sure 

 that he shall find a fountain ready to afford him its 

 cooling water. 



Nor is it only when standing alone in the desert 

 that the palm is a majestic tree. Palms form the 

 shade and the beauty of many of the tropical forests. 

 Some of them are among the tallest of trees; and 

 when the margin of a river is spoken of as more 

 than usually delightful, we allude to its " palmy side." 



The Cucurito, a palm of South America, throws 

 out its magnificent leaves over a trunk a hundred 

 feet high. This family of plants diminish in grandeur 

 and beauty as they advance towards the temperate 

 zone ; and Humboldt says that those who have only 

 travelled in the north of Africa, in Sicily, and in 

 Murcia, cannot conceive how the palms should be 

 the most imposing in their forms of all the trees of 

 the forest. The palms of South America furnish food 

 in a variety of ways to the people; so that in those 

 wild districts, the assertion of Linnaeus forces itself 

 upon the mind, that the region of palms was the 

 first country of the human race, and that man is 

 essentially palmivorous. 



