OF THE PALMS. 11 



of their twisting round the trunks of the taller 

 trees, dangling in giant festoons from bough to 

 bough, or tying together, in nooses of the most 

 fantastic kind, trees that are considerably dis- 

 tant one from another, these cord-like stems 

 being also made more graceful by the addition 

 of a lovely foliage. Some species of calamus 

 (C. rudentum, etc.) exceed five hundred feet in 

 length ; and liumphius saj-s that they grow 

 even to the length of one thousand two hundred, 

 or one thousand eight hundred feet, (from one- 

 fifth to one-third of a mile), probably the 

 greatest length attained hj any single plant. 



Very different, too, in bulk are the trunks of 

 the palms. Sometimes they are disproportion- 

 ately thick and corpulent, as in the oil palm ; 

 sometimes slender and feeble as a reed, as in 

 Kunthia montana; sometimes towering to a 

 height of one hundred or even two hundred feet, 

 ■with a trunk not more than six or seven inches 

 in diameter, as in the West Indian cabbage 

 palm ; while others, more apparently propor- 

 tionate, are of considerable bulk, as well as 

 height. Occasionally the stem is swollen in 

 the middle, and tapers towards the top and 

 bottom, as in the Pahna real of Cuba. In some 

 cases the base of the stem commences at some 

 distance above the surface of the earth, being 



