PALMS. 



41 



of 200 feet, for Humboldt states that in South 

 America lie measured a palm, which was 192 English 

 feet 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 tcedigera 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 some- 

 times smooth and more or less regularly ringed, but they 

 are frequently armed with dense prickles which are some- 

 times 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 other- 

 wise be an unsightly object. The sheathing margins of 

 the leaves often break up into a fibrous material, some- 

 times resembling a coarse cloth, and in other cases more 

 like horsehair. 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 for a strong man. 

 The climbing palms are very remarkable, 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 



