BROOKLYN BOTANIC GARDEN 
LEAFLETS 
Series X Brooklyn, N.Y., May 17, 1922. No. 4 
BRAZIL NUTS 
Bertholletia excelsa is the name the scientists have attached 
to this rough-barked forest giant of the Amazon river basin, but 
to most people who eat its buttery nuts, it has other labels. In 
Bolivia, they fancy its three-sided oily seeds resemble in some 
way the almonds of their ancestral Spain, so they call them 
“almindras,” the Spanish for almond. In Brazil, these nuts re- 
minded the dark skinned Portuguese colonists of the chestnuts 
that clothed the mountain slopes of their distant motherland, so 
to them they are “castahnas,” the Portuguese for chestnut. And 
we English-speaking folk know them as Brazil nuts, Para nuts, 
butter nuts and “ nigger-toes.” 
‘‘Almindras, senor,” the Indian boatman said, as he pointed 
to a coffee-drying frame, covered with the drying nuts. And a 
short distance away towered the giant tree which gave them birth, 
some of the Earth-shaped fruit cases, 4-6 inches in diameter, still 
attached to the parent limbs like brown balls on a giant candelabra. 
Beneath the tree were many empty cases, from which the natives 
had taken the 12 to 24 nuts which each case contains. And as I 
left the boat to view this forest monster, the fruit of which had long 
held treasured boyhood associations for me, I confess to feeling 
like our friends who want to shake hands with the President or 
with some other prominent member of the human species. I almost 
wished this giant tree were human so I could have spoken with it 
and told the friends back home, as we sat about the fireplace on a 
cold winter night, eating the nuts— how ‘‘when I was in Bolivia, 
you know, I met Senor Bertholletia and shook hands with him. 
Awfully democratic fellow — not a bit snobbish.” 
As I stood one day admiring the hundred feet, more or less, 
of rough bark-clothed trunk and the long, handsome, glossy, dark- 
green chestnut-like leaves, one of the big balls fell from the sixtv- 
foot perch above me, hitting the undergrowth and ground with a 
crash like the nearby report of a gun. And as Mr. Longfellow 
said of the famous Finney turnip, 
" There it lay and it lay 
Till it began to rot.” 
That is, the fruit cases have no natural method of opening and 
dispersing the nuts, so that they can sprout and produce more 
trees, except through the rotting away of the fruit case walls. 
