21Q TlMEHRI. 
and in pi6lures, something of this beauty.* He has failed 
conspicuously in this, as he has failed in hardly anything 
else. Where he has failed, I shall not attempt to suc- 
ceed ; but I am certain that a traveller who would in any 
adequate way use his pencil and his pen to pi6lure for 
those at home the beauty of palms would add not a lit- 
tle to the pleasures of the world. t 
But in addition to their stately beauty, palm trees are 
vividly interesting by reason of the many uses to which 
they may be, and are, put. No better illustration of 
this could be found than the account which I shall pre- 
sently have to give of the produces and uses of one of 
our commonest species (Mauritia flexnosa Lin :). 
The notes herein to be set in order have been accu- 
mulating since the autumn of 1879, when my friend Mr. 
JENMAN and I spent some months on the Corentyn 
river, paying special attention to the palms, which seem to 
be present in even greater variety on that river than else- 
where in the colony. We then made unusually elabo- 
rate collections of herbarium specimens of these plants, 
which are seldom adequately represented in even the 
greatest herbaria, on account of the great labour of 
* " Palm Trees of the Amazon, and their Uses," by Alfred Russell 
Wallace. London, 1853. 
■j- For the Edinburgh Forestry Exhibition, I recently superintended 
the taking of a large number of large photographs of various species of 
palm, especially of one of the most beautiful of all our palms, the cok- 
erite (Maximiliana Martiana : Karst). The result was somewhat disap- 
pointing to the high expectations which I had formed, chiefly on 
account of the difficulty of exposing the plates sufficiently long without 
the wind moving the leafage. But engravings or drawings intelligently 
made by a botanist from these photographs would probably better 
represent palms than could easily be accomplished in any other way. 
