EXPLANATORY INDEX. 355 



^TA [Mauritia flexuosa). — This is a palm, wliicli, in favour- 

 able situations, attains an enormous size, sometimes being 

 upwards of a hundred feet in height before the branches, or 

 rather leaves, are reached. As this great palm is widely 

 spread and is conspicuous, it has received various names. 

 Waterton calls it ^ta, spelt by others Ita or Itah. But 

 the name by which it is most generally known is Moriche, or 

 Mui'ichi. Of this splendid palm, Kingsley writes as follows 

 in At Last : — 



"The noble Moriche palm delights in wet, at least in 

 Trinidad and on the lower Orinoco ; but Schomburgk describes 

 forests of them — if, indeed, it be the same species — as grov/ing 

 in the mountains of Guiana up to an altitude of four thousand 

 feet. 



" The soil in which they grow here is half pitch pavement, 

 half loose brown earth, and over both, shallow pools of water, 

 which will become much deeper in the wet season ; and all 

 about float or lie their pretty fruit, the size of an apple, and 

 scaled like a fir cone. They ai*e last years, empty and de- 

 cayed. The ripe fruit contains first a rich pulpy nut, and at 

 last a hard cone, something like that of the vegetable ivory 

 palm {Phytelephas macrocarpa) which grows in the mainland, 

 but not here. Delicious they are, and precious to monkeys 

 and parrots, as well as to the Orinoco Indians, among whom 

 the Jamunacs, according to Humboldt, say, that when a man 

 and woman survived that great deluge, which the Mexicans 

 call the age of water, they cast behind them, over their heads, 

 the fruits of the Moriche palm, as Deucalion and Pyrrha cast 

 stones, and saw the seeds in them produce men and women, 

 who re-peopled the earth. No wonder, indeed that certain 

 tribes look on this tree as sacred, or that the missionaries 

 should have named it the tree of life." 



Humboldt gives the following eloquent account of this 

 palm in his Personal Narrative : — 



" In the season of inundations these clumps of Mauritia, 

 with their leaves in the form of a fan, have the appearance 



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