158 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



A few words about palms may contribute to give you some 

 idea of the peculiarity of the vegetation of those regions. 

 Palms themselves differ from all other plants in their growth. 

 The stem is regular, remarkably straight, and the leaves are 

 generally in a tuft at the summit. That is the appearance of 

 ' most palms. The leaves themselves exliibit two types — one in 

 which the leaflets are of the same length, and spread like an 

 open fan, and another in which the midrib is elongated, and in 

 which the leaflets are placed right and left on the side of the 

 midrib, like the barbules of a feather. These two types extend 

 through the whole family of palms. There is no intermediate 

 form ; but the palms themselves differ from one another in 

 their dimensions, in the combinations of their leaves, in their 

 arrangement, in the character of the wood, in the character of 

 the bark, in the height and shape of the tree, the appearance of 

 the flower, in the appearance and size of the tree, and in the 

 character of the fruit. 



To give you some idea of the various kinds of these palms, 

 I will describe some of them. The Miriti, for instance, which is 

 one of those from which the largest number of useful materials 

 is derived, is a palm, the stump of which is about the diameter 

 of my body, and it shoots up straight to the height of fifteen, 

 eighteen and twenty feet, and on the summit spreads the fan- 

 like leaves, not very many in number, but of colossal dimen- 

 sions. I was desirous, when I first saw that tree, to obtain a 

 leaf, and I sent a man up the tree, with' a hatchet, to bring 

 me down one. He sat in the angle of one leaf, in which he 

 was as secure as he would have been in the forked branch of 

 an oak tree, and chopped away with his hatchet for many 

 minutes before he had cut through the leaf stock, which brought 

 down a single leaf; and when that leaf was on the ground, it 

 was hard work for a man to raise it. That is the kind of foliage 

 which that particular species of palm produces ; and it has 

 bunches of fruit which are not unlike in their arrangement a 

 bunch of grapes. I have plenty of these things at the Museum 

 in Cambridge, but they are at present accessible only to myself 

 and one or two persons at a time, because they are so crowded 

 that there is no possibility of going between them ; but one of 

 these days, they will be visible to all. Now, one spike of the 



