II EQUATORIAL VEGETATION 249 
high. The leaves of palms are often of immense size. 
Those of the Manicaria saccifera of Para are thirty feet long 
and four or five feet wide, and are not pinnate but entire 
and very rigid. Some of the pinnate leaves are much larger, 
those of the Raphia tedigera and Maximiliana regia being 
both sometimes more than fifty feet long. The fan-shaped 
leaves of other species are ten or twelve feet in diameter. 
The trunks of palms are sometimes smooth and more or less 
regularly ringed, but they are frequently armed with dense 
prickles which are sometimes eight inches long. In some 
species the leaves fall to the ground as they decay, leaving a 
clean scar, but in most cases they are persistent, rotting 
slowly away, and leaving a mass of fibrous stumps attached 
to the upper part of the stem. This rotting mass forms an 
excellent soil for ferns, orchids, and other semi-parasitical 
plants, which form an attractive feature on what would 
otherwise be an unsightly object. The sheathing margins of 
the leaves often break up into a fibrous material, sometimes 
resembling a coarse cloth, and in other cases more like horse- 
hair. The flowers are not individually large, but form large 
spikes or racemes, and the fruits are often beautifully scaled 
and hang in huge bunches, which are sometimes more than a 
load fora strong man. The climbing palms are very remark- 
able, their tough, slender, prickly stems mounting up by means 
of the hooked midribs of the leaves to the tops of the 
loftiest forest trees, above which they send up an elegant 
spike of foliage and flowers. The most important are the 
American Desmoncus and the Eastern Calamus, the latter 
being the well-known rattan or cane of which chair-seats are 
made, from the Malay name “rotang.” The rattan-palms 
are the largest and most remarkable of the climbing group. 
They are very abundant in the drier equatorial forests, and 
more than sixty species are known from the Malay Archi- 
pelago. The stems (when cleaned from the sheathing leaves 
and prickles) vary in size, from the thickness of a quill to 
that of the wrist; and where abundant they render the 
forest almost impassable. They lie about the ground coiled 
and twisted and looped in the most fantastic manner. They 
hang in festoons from trees and branches, they rise suddenly 
through mid air up to the top of the forest, or coil loosely 
