SS6 
THE PIBITU PAIj51-TEEJS. 
the expedition for settling the boundaries. The Indians a* 
a little more civilized here than in the rest of the missions • 
and we found to our surprise a blacksmith of the native race. 
In the mission of San .Fernando, a tree which gives a pecu- 
liar physiognomy to the landscape, is the piritu or pirija 0 
palm. Its trunk, armed with thorns, is more than sixty f ee j 
high ; its leaves are pinnated, very thin, undulated, and 
frizzled towards the points. The fruits of this tree are very 
extraordinary; every cluster contains from fifty to eighty; 
they are yellow like apples, grow purple in proportion as they 
ripen, two or three inches thick, and generally, from abor- 
tion, without a kernel. Among the eighty or ninety species 
of palm-trees peculiar to the New Continent, which 1 
have enumerated in the 1 Nova Genera Plantarum JEq u1 ' 
noctialium,’ there are none in which the sareoearp is developed 
in a manner so extraordinary. The fruit of the pinj a ° 
furnishes a farinaceous substance, as yellow as the yolk of ip 1 
egg, Blightly saccharine, and extremely nutritious. It 19 
eaten like plantains or potatoes, boiled or roasted in tj'° 
ashes, and affords a wholesome and agreeable aliment. T*' e 
Indians and the missionaries are unwearied in their praises 
of this noble palm-tree, which might be called the peachy 
palm. Wo found it cultivated in abundance at San I' er * 
nando, San Balthasar, Santa Barbara, and wherever 
advanced towards the south or the east along the banks 0 
the Atabapo and the Upper Orinoco. In those wild regie) 1 
we are involuntarily reminded of the assertion of Linn® 11 ’ 
that the country of palm-trees was the first abode of of 
species, and that man is essentially palmivorous* ~ 
examining the provision accumulated in the huts of r j 
Indians, we perceive that their subsistence during sever* 
months of the year depends as much on the farinaceous 
of the pirijao, as on the cassava and plantain. The tree ben 
fruit but once a year, but to the amount of three cluster-’ 
consequently from one hundred and fifty to two hundr 1 ^ 
fruits. 
* Homo habitat infra tropicos, vescitar palmis, lotophagus; 
extra tropicos sub n overcame Cerere, caroivorus. — “Man dwells » a ^ 
rally within the tropics, and lives on the fruits of the palm-tree 
exists in other parts of the world, and there makes shift to feed on ' 
and flesh.” (Syet. Nat., vol. i, p. 24.) 
