THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM, 367 



The hardiest trees serve to build our dwellings with; 

 other plants form our most natural food. 



Sometimes the existence of certain tribes depends on a 

 single vegetable species. A palm which grows in the forests 

 at the mouth of the Orinoco, suffices for all the wants of 

 some savage races, who, in company with the monkeys, live 

 almost constantly perched as it were to the midst of its 

 fohage. It yields them food, wine, and even cordage to 

 • swing the hammocks on, in which they suspend themselves 

 during the inundations.^ 



In all ages men have sought for the l^eauty and perfume 

 of flowers, and they have become an indispensal:)le orna- 

 ment of even the least important festival. The ancients 

 had their "coronary plant.s;" these were consecrated to 

 Venus and at feasts each guest Avore a chaplet. But we 

 must also do them the justice to remark, that they em- 

 ployed an ample series of "funereal plants" for the mourn- 



miisk-ox are not at hand, gladly eats the black tripe de roche, scraped with weary 

 labour from the stone it incrasts and resembles; and even the Esquimaux, in- 

 habiting a yet more inhospitable country, devours with greedy relish the half- 

 digested moss he finds in the stomach of the reindeer. Wherever man has pene- 

 trated, from the tropic swamp to the borders of the arctic snow, he has met with 

 plants capable of jaelding him sustenance or ministering to his wants." — Johnson 

 and Sowerby, Tlie Useful Plants of Oreat Britain. — Tr. 



' The palm spoken of here belongs to the genus Mauritia. It grows b)' the 

 banks of the Orinoco, along almost the whole course of its stream, and forms 

 remarkable forests near its mouths. "At the time of the iuundations," says 

 Humboldt, "the tufts of the fan-leaved murichi {Mauritia flexuosa) present the 

 api^earance of a forest issuing from the bosom of the waters. The navigator, 

 traversing at night the branches of the Orinoco delta, sees with surprise the 

 crowns of these palms lighted up by large fires. These are the habitations of 

 the Guaranis suspended from the trunks of the trees. These people stretch 

 mats in the air, fill them with earth, and on this bed of wet clay light what fires 

 they require for household purposes. For ages they have owed their liberty and 

 political independence to the treacherous and miry nature of their soil, which 

 they traverse in seasons of drought, and over which they aloue know how 

 to pass in safety; to their isolation in the delta of the Orinoco, and to their 

 living in the trees. — Von Humboldt, Voyage aux Regions Equinoxiales, t. viii, 

 p. 363. 



47 



