124 VARIOUS USEFUL PALMS. 
planter may describe a useful plant or its product. For in this 
way only are others enabled to recognise it, and, therefore, in 
cases where an observer is himself unable to identify or to de- 
scribe a natural product, it is of great advantage that he should 
send sufficient materials of a plant along with its products, to 
Societies or to qualified individuals, in order that these may 
identify and refer them to their proper plants. 
We might also have mentioned many of the Palms of other 
countries, which are applied to various useful purposes on ac- 
count of the fibrous materials with which their leaves abound. 
Thus the Chinese are said to make cables of Palm leaves. The 
Areca vestiaria is so called from clothing being made from its 
fibres, and Rhapis cochinchinensis is employed for thatching, 
&c. The Doum Palm of Egypt (Hyphene thebaica) is, like the 
Date Palm, used for making utensils of various kinds, as are 
also various South American Palms; while, in North America, 
Palmetto thatch forms an article of export, and the leaves of 
Lodoicea Seychellarum (the Palm yielding the formerly much 
famed “Cocos de Mer’ or “Double Cocoa-nut”’) are formed 
into baskets and flowers—for a specimen of which, in the 
Mauritius collection, a Prize Medal was awarded at the Exhi- 
bition of 1851. 
The detailed accounts we have given of so many of the Palms 
prove incontestably the great value of these plants to the re- 
gions where they are indigenous—yielding flour and sugar, 
milk and honey-like fluids, demulcent drinks and fiery spirit, 
fibre for cordage and for clothing, leaves for thatching and for 
platting, as well as wood for a variety of purposes. There is 
little doubt that some may yield the fibre which so abounds in 
their leaves, sufficiently easily to be useful to the paper-maker. 
