138 PHYSIOGNOMY OF PLANTS. 



trees/' I have already spoken in the first volume of the 

 present work, p. 216, of these beautiful fruits, of which 

 there are seventy or eighty in a bunch, and which can be 

 prepared as food in a variety of ways, like plantains and 

 potatoes. 



In some species of Palms the flower sheath, or spathe 

 surrounding the spadix and the flowers, opens suddenly 

 with an audible sound. Eichard Schomburgk (Reisen in 

 Britisch Guiana, Th. i. S. 55) has like myself observed this 

 phenomenon in the flowering of the Oreodoxa oleracea. 

 This first opening of the flowers of Palms accompanied by 

 sound recalls the vernal Dithyrambus of Pindar, and the 

 moment when, in Argive Nemea, " the first opening shoot 

 of the date-palm proclaims the arrival of balmy spring." 

 (Kosmos, Bd. ii. S. 10 ; Eng. ed. p. 10.) 



Three vegetable forms of peculiar beauty are proper to the 

 tropical zone in all parts of the globe ; Palms, Plantains or 

 Bananas, and Arborescent Terns. It is where heat and 

 moisture are combined that vegetation is most vigorous, and 

 its form? most varied ; and hence South America excels the 

 rest of the tropical world, in the number and beauty of her 

 species of Palms. In Asia this form of vegetation is more 

 rare, perhaps because a considerable part of the Indian 

 continent which was situated immediately under the equi- 

 noctial line has been broken up and covered by the sea in 

 the course of former geological revolutions. "We know 

 scarcely anything of the palm trees of Africa between the 

 Bight of Benin and the Coast of Ajan; and, generally 



