n^ ISLES OF SUMMER. 



and beset with sturdy spines, capable, as we well know, of in- 

 flicting a severe wound. As it increases in age and size, the 

 thorns fall off, and five or six broad buttress-shaped supports are 

 developed, star-wise, from the trunk, propping the tree in various 

 directions against the enormous overhanging force which must 

 bear upon it during tropical storms. * * * A rough estimate 

 of the buttresses gave a circumference of eighty yards, or a 

 diameter of about eighty feet. The compartments between the 

 buttresses resembled small angular courts separated by high 

 %valls." He estimates that in these compartments, outside of 

 the solid trunk, if the thin dividing buttress were removed, 

 "2,400 people could stand round this ceiba," allowing each two 

 square feet of standing room. 



In tropical and semi-tropical countries there is no tree or bush 

 which so attracts the attention and interests the mind of the 

 stranger from the North as the palm. It is one of God's most 

 valuable gifts to man, and he has few physical wants that it can- 

 not be made in whole or in part to supply, while it greatly min- 

 isters by its strange and varied beauty to his esthetic taste. 

 Botanists in classifying and arranging it divide it into five or 

 more families, seventy to a hundred genera, and a thousand or 

 more different species. In South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, 

 we made the acquaintance of two of these, — the scrub palmetto, 

 with its beautiful long, green, radiating leaves, from which palm 

 leaf fans are made, and the palmetto tree, from whose tall, 

 straight, branchless stem or body, a rich cluster of similar leaves 

 spread out in every direction at the top. 



The cocoanut palm has the same habit of growth, and thrives 

 upon the island of New Providence. But its leaves are quite 

 unlike those of the palmetto, being long and graceful, crowning 

 the tall, straight, branchless stem, and drooping in beautiful 

 curves over the thickly compacted fruit that nestles under the 

 shadows of its evergreen wings. 



