1848.] 
INDIA-KUBBER TREE. 
33 
did palm-trees. Here the Assai Palm, so common about 
the city, reached an enormous height. With a smooth 
stem only four inches in diameter, some specimens were 
eighty feet high. Sometimes they are perfectly straight, 
sometimes gently curved, and, with the drooping crowns 
of foliage, are most beautiful. Here also grew the Inaja, 
a fine thick-stemmed species, with a very large dense 
head of foliage. The undeveloped leaves of this as^well 
as many other kinds form an excellent vegetable, called 
here palmeto, and probably very similar to that pro- 
duced by the cabbage -palm of the West Indies. A 
prickly-stemmed fan-leaved palm, which we had observed 
at the mills, was also growing here. But the most strik- 
ing and curious of all was the Paxiuba, a tall, straight, 
perfectly smooth-stemmed palm, with a most elegant 
head, formed of a few large curiously-cut leaves. Its 
great singularity is, that the greater part of its roots are 
above ground, and they successively die away, fresh 
ones springing out of the stem higher up, so that the 
whole tree is supported on three or four stout straight 
roots, sometimes so high that a person can stand between 
them with the lofty tree growing over his head. The 
main roots often diverge again before they reach the 
ground, each into three or more smaller ones, not an inch 
each in diameter. Though the stem of the tree is quite 
smooth, the roots are thickly covered with large tuber- 
culous prickles. Numbers of small trees of a few feet 
high grow all around, each standing upon its legs, a minia- 
ture copy of its parent. Isidora cut down an Assai palm, 
to get some palmeto for our dinner ; it forms an agree- 
able vegetable of a sweetish fiavour. Just as we were 
D 
