THE MANGOSTEEN AND ITS RELATIVES 391 



Yet, strangely enough, this "prize of the Indies," admitted 

 by all to be the finest fruit of the tropics, remains to this day 

 extremely limited in its distribution, and known only to the 

 favored few who have lived or traveled in the East Indies. 

 David Fairchild, who has studied its requirements more ex- 

 haustively than any other man, is convinced " that the acclima- 

 tization of the mangosteen on the island of Porto Rico, and in 

 many other parts of tropical America, is a possibility, and that 

 the principal difficulties of its culture have probably arisen 

 from an ignorance of the soil conditions demanded by the 

 plant." Trees have fruited in Jamaica, Dominica, and Trinidad. 

 There is a fruiting tree in Hawaii and a few others are scattered 

 throughout the tropics in regions where it would have been 

 said a few years ago that mangosteens could not be grown. 

 There are grounds for the hope, therefore, that commercial 

 production of this delectable fruit will not remain limited to a 

 remote region in the eastern tropics. 



The mangosteen is a small tree rarely over 30 feet high, with 

 deep green foliage which glistens in the sunlight. The leaves 

 are elliptic-oblong in form, acuminate at the tip, thick and 

 leathery in texture, and 6 to 10 inches long. The flowers are 

 polygamous; the staminate or male blossoms are borne in 

 three- to nine-flowered terminal fascicles, and have orbicular 

 sepals and broadly ovate, fleshy petals. The hermaphrodite 

 flower is 2 inches broad, and is borne solitary or in pairs at the 

 tips of the young branches. The sepals and petals resemble 

 those of the male flower. The stamens are many, the ovary four- 

 to eight-celled, with a sessile, eight-rayed stigma. 



" This delicious fruit is about the size of a mandarin orange, round 

 and slightly flattened at each end, with a smooth, thick rind, rich 

 red-purple in color, with here and there a bright, hardened drop of 

 the yellow juice which marks some injury to the rind when it was 

 young. As these mangosteens are sold in the Dutch East Indies, 

 heaped up on fruit baskets, or made into long regular bundles with 

 thin strips of braided bamboo, they are as strikingly handsome as 



