BABER. 
153 
were too tempting a prize to be abandoned. The king 
was a profound admirer of Nature, and India presented 
objects to diet his admiration. Her palm trees alone 
are a volume for the study of those who love to ex- 
amine the wonders of the vegetable world. The most 
useful of these palms, and not the least extraordinary, 
is the palmyra.'* Its manner of growth is similar to 
that of the cocoa-nut tree. The stem attains nearly the 
same height, but is more uniformly perpendicular, and 
the texture of the timber much firmer and more dur- 
able. The blacker this is, the more valuable ; and it 
has the rare quality of resisting the depredations of in- 
sects. The leaves are shorter, harder, and thicker than 
those of the tree just mentioned, having the form 
of an open fan, as which they are frequently used, 
and from this circumstance the palmyra is common- 
ly called the fan-leaf palm. Upon slips of these leaves 
all Cingalese and Burmese manuscripts are written 
with an iron stylus. The fruit of this palm is a firm 
pulp, about the bigness of a new-born child’s head, of 
a black colour, emitting an agreeable perfume, and con- 
taining in its centre from one to three nuts the size of 
a common plum. The toddy drawn from the pal- 
myra makes better arrack than that extracted from 
any other palm ; and excellent sugar is obtained by 
mixing the toddy with the pulp of the fruit and 
boiling them together. This .tree, besides supplying a 
valuable wood for exportation, is of the greatest im- 
portance to the natives ; its fruit and roots being used 
by them for food, and many other parts being success- 
fully applied to the purposes of manufacture. The 
* See Vignette. 
