93 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 
walls.” 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. 
Tn 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. 
