Palm trees of the Amazon and their uses

by Alfred Russel Wallace

INTRODUCTION.

Palms are endogenous or ingrowing plants, belonging to the same great division of the Vegetable Kingdom as the Grasses, Bamboos, Lilies and Pineapples, and not to that which contains all our English forest trees. They are perennial, not annual like most of the above-named plants, and probably reach a great age. Their stems are simple or very rarely forked, slender, erect, and cylindrical, not tapering as in most other trees; they are hardest on the outside, and are marked more or less distinctly with scars or rings, marking the situation of the fallen leaves.

The leaves are generally terminal, forming a bunch or head at the summit of the tree; they are of very large size, have long petioles or footstalks, and are alternately placed on the stem. In shape they are pinnate or flabellate, or rarely simple, sheathing at the base, without stipules; and they have a plicate vernation, or are folded up lengthways before they open. The margins of the sheathing bases of the leaf-stalks are often fibrous, and give out a variety of singular processes.

The flowers are numerous, small, symmetrical, uncoloured, or obscurely so, six-parted, and hermaphrodite or polygamous. They are produced in a spadix from the axils of the leaves, and are generally enclosed in a spathe or sheath. The ovary or seed-vessel is three-celled or three-lobed, but the fruit is generally one-seeded from abortion, and the seed is large and albuminous with a fibrous or fleshy covering.

Palms are almost exclusively tropical plants, very few species being found in the temperate zone, and those only in the warmer parts of it, while the nearer we approach the equator the more numerous they become both in species and individuals. Dr. Martius, a Prussian botanist and traveller in South America, has published a magnificent work in three folio volumes, entirely devoted to the Botanical history of this family of plants. He divides the portion of the earth which produces palms into five regions, namely,—

The North Palm Zone, extending from the northern limit of Palms to the tropic of Cancer.

The transition North Palm Zone, from the tropic of Cancer to 10° north latitude.

The Chief Palm Zone, from 10° north to 10° south latitude.

The transition South Palm Zone, from 10° south latitude to the tropic of Capricorn, and

The South Palm Zone, from the tropic of Capricorn to the southern limit of the family.

The Northern limit of Palms is, in Europe 43° of latitude, in Asia 34°, and in America 34°.

The Southern limit is 34° in Africa, 38° in New Zealand, and 36° in South America.

To the north of the tropic of Cancer there are 43 species of Palms known, and to the south of the tropic of Capricorn only 13, while as we advance from either side towards the equator the number increases, until in the Chief Zone, between 10° north and 10° south latitude, there are more than 300 species (see Frontispiece Map).

In the Old World, the rich islands of the Eastern Archipelago produce the greatest number of Palms; in the New, the great valleys of the Amazon and Orinoco on the main land, are most prolific.

In proportion to its extent, America is the most productive palm country; for while the Old World, including Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Eastern Archipelago, with New Holland and all the Pacific Islands, contain 307 species, the New World or America alone has 275 different kinds.

In the Old World the islands produce more species than the continents, the former containing 194, while the latter have only 113.

In the New World, however, the reverse is the case, the continent there containing 234, while the islands possess only 42 kinds of Palms.

The total number of Palms at present known is less than 600. Dr. Martius thinks that the probable number existing on the earth may be from 1000 to 1200; though, as similar calculations have hitherto almost invariably been proved, as our knowledge increased, to be far below the truth, it is not unlikely that a few years may render double this number a more probable estimate.

Palms present to our view the most graceful and picturesque, as well as some of the most majestic forms in the vegetable kingdom. Though many of them have a sameness of aspect, yet there is a sufficient contrast and variety of forms to render them interesting objects in the landscape. The stems in some species do not appear above the ground, in others they rise to the height of 200 feet; some resemble reeds and are no thicker than a goose quill, others swell out to the bulk of a hogshead. There are climbing palms too, which trail their long flexible stems over trees and shrubs, or hang in tangled festoons between them.

The trunks of some are almost perfectly smooth, others rough with concentric rings, or clothed with a woven or hairy fibrous covering, which binds together the sheathing bases of the fallen leaves. Many are thickly beset with cylindrical or flat spines, often 8 or 10 inches long and as sharp as a needle; and the fallen leaves and stems of these offer a serious obstacle to the traveller who attempts to penetrate the tropical forests.

The leaves are large and often gigantic, surpassing those of any other family of plants. In some species they are 50 feet long and 8 wide; these are pinnate or composed of numerous long narrow leaflets placed at right angles to the midrib, but in others the leaves are entire and undivided, and yet are 30 feet or more in length and 4 or 5 in width. But the most remarkable form of leaf is the fan-shaped, which characterizes a considerable number of species, and gives them such a completely different aspect, as to render it, to ordinary observers, the most palpable feature dividing the whole family into two distinct groups. The Palms having fan-shaped leaves are, however, comparatively few, being only 91 out of 582 known species.

The flowers are small and inconspicuous, generally of a white, pale yellow or green colour, but often produced in such dense masses as to have a striking appearance. They sometimes emit a very powerful odour, which attracts swarms of minute insects; and a newly-burst palm spathe may often be discovered by the buzzing cloud of small flies and beetles which hover over it.

The fruits are generally small, when compared with the size of the trees; the common cocoa-nut being one of the largest in the whole family. The kernel of many is too hard to be eaten, and the outer covering is often fibrous or woody; but in others the seeds are covered with a pulpy or farinaceous mass, which in most cases furnishes a grateful and nutritious food.

The purposes to which the different parts of Palms are applied are very various, the fruit, the leaves, and the stem all having many uses in the different species. Some of them produce valuable articles of export to our own and other countries, but they are of far more value to the natives of the districts where they grow, in many cases furnishing the most important necessaries for existence.

The Cocoa-nut is known to us only as an agreeable fruit, and its fibrous husk supplies us with matting, coir ropes, and stuffing for mattresses; but in its native countries it serves a hundred purposes; food and drink and oil are obtained from its fruit, hats and baskets are made of its fibre, huts are covered with its leaves, and its leaf-stalks are applied to a variety of uses. To us the Date is but an agreeable fruit, but to the Arab it is the very staff of life; men and camels almost live upon it, and on the abundance of the date harvest depends the wealth and almost the existence of many desert tribes. It is truly indigenous to those inhospitable wastes of burning sand, which without it would be uninhabitable by man.

A palm tree of Africa, the Æleis guianensis, gives us oil and candles. It inhabits those parts of the country where the slave trade is carried on, and it is thought by persons best acquainted with the subject that the extension of the trade in palm oil will be the most effectual check to that inhuman traffic; so that a palm tree may be the means of spreading the blessings of civilization and humanity among the persecuted negro race.

Sago is another product of a palm, which is of comparatively little importance to us, but in the East supplies the daily food of thousands. In many parts of the Indian Archipelago it forms almost the entire subsistence of the people, taking the place of rice in Asia, corn in Europe, and maize and mandiocca in America, and is worthy to be classed with these the most precious gifts of nature to mankind. Unlike them, however, it is neither seed nor root, but is the wood itself, the pithy centre of the stem, requiring scarcely any preparation to fit it for food; and it is so abundant that a single tree often yields six hundred pounds weight.

The canes used for chair bottoms and various other purposes, are the stems of species of Calamus, slender palms which abound in the East Indian jungles, climbing over other trees and bushes by the help of the long hooked spines with which their leaves are armed. They sometimes reach the enormous length of 600 or even 1000 feet, and as four millions of them are imported into this country annually, a great number of persons must find employment in cutting them.

A variety of species, in all parts of the world, furnish a sugary sap from their stems or unopened spathes, which when partly fermented is the palm wine of Africa and the Toddy of the East Indies; and a similar beverage is procured from the Mauritia vinifera and other species in South America. Indeed, at the mouth of the Orinoco dwell a nation of Indians whose existence depends almost entirely on a species of Palm, supposed to be the Mauritia flexuosa. They build their houses elevated on its trunks, and live principally upon its fruit and sap, with fish from the waters around them.

Among the most singular products of palm trees are the resins and wax produced by some species. The fruits of a species of Calamus of the Eastern Archipelago are covered with a resinous substance of a red colour, which, in common with a similar product from some other trees, is the Dragon’s blood of commerce, and is used as a pigment, for varnish, and in the manufacture of tooth powder. The Ceroxylon andicola, a lofty palm growing in the Andes of Bogotá, produces a resinous wax which is secreted in its stem and used by the inhabitants of the country for making candles and for other purposes. Again, in some of the northern provinces of Brazil is found a palm tree called Carnaúba, the Copernicia cerifera, having the underside of its leaves covered with white wax, which has no admixture of resin, but is as pure as that procured from our hives.

The leaves of palms, however, are applied to the greatest variety of uses; thatch for houses, umbrellas, hats, baskets and cordage in countless varieties are made from them, and every tropical country possesses some species adapted to these varied purposes, which in temperate zones are generally supplied by a very different class of plants. The Chip, or Brazilian-grass hats, so cheap in this country, are made from the leaves of a palm tree which grows in Cuba, whence they are imported for the purpose: the palm is the Chamærops argentea; and in Sicily an allied species, the Chamærops humilis (the only European palm), is applied in a similar manner to form hats, baskets, and a variety of useful articles.

The papyrus of the ancient Egyptians, and the metallic plates on which other nations wrote, were not used in India, but their place was supplied by the leaves of palms, on whose hard and glossy surface the characters of the Pali and Sanscrit languages were inscribed with a metallic point. The leaves of the Corypha taliera are used for this purpose, and when strung together, form the volumes of a Hindu library.

A favourite stimulant too of the Malays is furnished by a palm. The fruit of the Areca catechu is the betelnut, which they chew with lime, and which is their substitute for the opium of the Chinese, the tobacco of Europeans, and the coca of the South Americans.

One of the most recent introductions into our own domestic economy is the fibre of a palm, the Piassaba, which is now generally used for coarse brooms and brushes; and in the valley of the Amazon, of which it is a native, the same material is manufactured into cables, which are cheap and very durable in the water.

We have now glanced at a few of the most important uses to which Palms are applied, but in order to be able to appreciate how much the native tribes of the countries where they most abound are dependent on this noble family of plants, and how they take part in some form or other in almost every action of the Indian’s life, we must enter into his hut and inquire into the origin and structure of the various articles we shall see around us.

Suppose then we visit an Indian cottage on the banks of the Rio Negro, a great tributary of the river Amazon in South America. The main supports of the building are trunks of some forest tree of heavy and durable wood, but the light rafters overhead are formed by the straight cylindrical and uniform stems of the Jará palm. The roof is thatched with large triangular leaves, neatly arranged in regular alternate rows, and bound to the rafters with sipós or forest creepers; the leaves are those of the Caraná palm. The door of the house is a framework of thin hard strips of wood neatly thatched over; it is made of the split stems of the Pashiúba palm. In one corner stands a heavy harpoon for catching the cow-fish; it is formed of the black wood of the Pashiúba barriguda. By its side is a blowpipe ten or twelve feet long, and a little quiver full of small poisoned arrows hangs up near it; with these the Indian procures birds for food, or for their gay feathers, or even brings down the wild hog or the tapir, and it is from the stem and spines of two species of Palms that they are made. His great bassoon-like musical instruments are made of palm stems; the cloth in which he wraps his most valued feather ornaments is a fibrous palm spathe, and the rude chest in which he keeps his treasures is woven from palm leaves. His hammock, his bow-string and his fishing-line are from the fibres of leaves which he obtains from different palm trees, according to the qualities he requires in them,—the hammock from the Mirití, and the bow-string and fishing-line from the Tucúm. The comb which he wears on his head is ingeniously constructed of the hard bark of a palm, and he makes fish hooks of the spines, or uses them to puncture on his skin the peculiar markings of his tribe. His children are eating the agreeable red and yellow fruit of the Pupunha or peach palm, and from that of the Assaí he has prepared a favourite drink, which he offers you to taste. That carefully suspended gourd contains oil, which he has extracted from the fruit of another species; and that long elastic plaited cylinder used for squeezing dry the mandiocca pulp to make his bread, is made of the bark of one of the singular climbing palms, which alone can resist for a considerable time the action of the poisonous juice. In each of these cases a species is selected better adapted than the rest for the peculiar purpose to which it is applied, and often having several different uses which no other plant can serve as well, so that some little idea may be formed of how important to the South American Indian must be these noble trees, which supply so many daily wants, giving him his house, his food, and his weapons.

To the lover of nature Palms offer a constant source of interest, reminding him that he is amidst the luxuriant vegetation of the tropics, and offering to him the realization of whatever wild and beautiful ideas he has from childhood associated with their name.

In the equatorial regions of South America they are seldom absent. Either delicate species flourishing in the dense shade of the virgin forest; or lofty and massive, standing erect on the river’s banks; or on the hill side raising their leafy crowns on airy stems above the surrounding trees, creating, as Humboldt styles it, “a forest above a forest;” in every situation some are to be met with as representatives of the magnificent and regal family to which they belong.

In the following pages the genera and species are arranged in the order adopted by Dr. Martius in his elaborate work already alluded to.

Natural Order PALMACEÆ.
Genus Leopoldinia, Martius.

This genus is characterized by having flowers containing stamens or pistils only, intermingled on the same spadix, and by not having a spathe. The male flowers have six stamens and no rudiments of a stigma. The female flowers have three sessile stigmas and rudimentary stamens. The spadix is much branched and decomposed.

The species are trees of a moderate size without any spines or tubercles, but remarkable for the netted fibres which spring from the margins of the sheathing petioles, and cover the stem half way down or sometimes even to its base. The leaves are terminal and pinnate, the leaflets spreading out regularly in one plane. There are often three or four spadices on a tree, bearing abundance of small flowers, and ovate compressed fruit, the outer covering of which is fleshy.

Four species are known, and they are all found in the same limited district near the Rio Negro, some extending to the tributaries of the Orinoco near its source, and one being found south of the Amazon nearly opposite the mouth of the Rio Negro. All however grow on the banks or in the immediate vicinity of black-ater streams, which occur more extensively in South America than in any other part of the globe. Two species are described by Martius, one of which is here figured with two others, which are believed to be new. They are not found more than 1000 feet above the level of the sea.

Pl. IV.
W. Fitch lith. Ford & West Imp.
LEOPOLDINIA PULCHRA. Ht. 12 Ft.

PLATE IV.
Leopoldinia pulchra, Martius.

Jará, Lingoa Geral.

The Jará or Jará mirí (little Jará) is from ten to fifteen feet high. The stem is cylindrical, erect, and about two inches in diameter. The leaves are very regularly pinnate, about four feet long, with the leaflets slightly drooping and the terminal pair small. The leaf-stalks are slender and the sheathing bases are persistent, giving out from their margins abundance of flat fibrous processes which are curiously netted and interlaced together, clothing the stem with a firm covering often down to the very base. At the lower part this gradually rots and is rubbed away or falls off, leaving the stem bare. The flower-stalks or spadices are numerous, and very large and much branched; and the fruits are about an inch in diameter, oval and flattened, and of a pale greenish yellow colour. The outer covering is firm and fleshy, and has a very bitter taste.

This species is found on the banks of the Rio Negro and some of its tributaries, from its mouth up to its source, and on the black-water tributaries of the Orinoco. It never grows far from the water’s edge, though generally out of reach of the floods in the wet season. It is not known to occur beyond this very limited district.

The stem of this tree being very smooth and cylindrical, and of a convenient length, it is much used for fencing round yards and gardens, and in the city of Barra do Rio Negro is universally employed for such purposes. The want of neatness out of doors, which is quite a characteristic of the Portuguese and Indian settlers on the Amazon, is always apparent in these fences. It is never thought worth while to cut the poles all to one length, but they are set up just as they are brought in from the forest; and the space between two handsome houses in the city may often be seen filled up with a Jará railing of most unpicturesque irregularity.

The bright green and glossy foliage of this tree also renders it suitable for another purpose. On certain saints’ days, little altars and green avenues are made before the principal houses in Barra, the Jará palm being always used to construct them; and its graceful fronds rustling in the evening breeze, fitfully reflecting the light of the wax tapers which burn before the image of the saint, with the blazing torches of the rustic procession, have a very pleasing effect.

The reticulate covering of the stem of this and the next species offers a fine station for the epiphytal Orchideæ to attach themselves, and the Jará palms are accordingly often adorned with their curious and ornamental flowers.

Plate II. figure 6. represents a fruit of this species of the natural size.

Pl. V.
W. Fitch lith.
LEOPOLDINIA MAJOR. Ht. 25 Ft.

PLATE V.
Leopoldinia major, n. sp.

Jará assú, Lingoa Geral.

The Jará assú or “greater Jará” closely resembles the last species, but it is considerably larger. The stem is four inches in diameter and reaches thirty feet in height. It is often much thicker at the bottom than in the upper part, and has a greater proportion of the stem bare. The leaves are very similar, but the spadices are larger, and the fruit is also larger and much more abundant.

This tree occurs plentifully on the lakes and inlets of the upper Rio Negro, but is not found at the mouth of the river like the last species. It grows too at a lower level, being often found with a part of the stem under water.

The Indians collect the fruit in large quantities, and by burning and washing extract a floury substance, which they use as a substitute for salt when they cannot procure that article. They assert positively that the smaller species of Jará will not yield the same product; but perhaps this may be only because the fruit is less abundant, and they do not take the trouble to collect it.

Coarse Portugal salt is used in the Rio Negro, and among the Indians in the upper part of the river serves as a circulating medium, about a pound of it being reckoned equivalent to a day’s work. The supply however is very uncertain, and there are many distant tribes which it scarcely ever reaches; and it is among them that the substitute is manufactured from the fruit of the Jará. It is doubtful, however, whether it contains any true salt, for it is described as being more bitter than saline in taste; yet with this alone to season their fish and cassava the Indians enjoy almost perfect health. Perhaps, therefore, mineral salt may not be such a necessary of life as we are accustomed to consider it.

Pl. VI.
W. Fitch lith. Ford & West Imp.
LEOPOLDINIA PIASSABA. Ht. 20 Ft.

PLATE VI.
Leopoldinia piassaba, n. sp.

Piassába, Lingoa Geral. Chíquichíqui, Barré. [An Indian language spoken on the Upper Rio Negro in Venezuela.]

This tree, the “Piassaba” of Brazil and the “Chíquichíqui” of Venezuela, I have little hesitation in referring to the genus Leopoldinia, though I have never seen it in flower or in fruit. The texture and form of the leaves, the peculiar branching of the spadix, and the extraordinary development of the fibres from the margins of the sheathing petioles, show it to be very closely allied to the other species of this genus.

The stem is generally short, but reaches twenty to thirty feet in height, and is much thicker than in either of the preceding species. The leaves are very large and regularly pinnate, with the pinnæ gradually smaller to the end, as in the two former species. The leaflets are rigid, broadest in the middle, and gradually tapering to a fine point, spreading out flat on each side of the midrib, but slightly drooping at the tips. The petioles are slender and smooth. The spadix is large, excessively branched and drooping, and there are often several on the same tree. The marginal processes of the petioles are interlaced as in the two former species, and are produced into long riband-like strips, which afterwards split into fine fibres, and hang down five or six feet, entirely concealing the stem, and giving the tree a most curious and unique appearance. The leaves form an excellent thatch, and are almost universally used in that portion of Venezuela situated on the upper Rio Negro, and the adjacent tributaries of the Orinoco. The fruit is said to resemble that of the Jará in colour, but it is globose and eatable, being used principally to form a thick drink by washing off the outer coating of pulp.

The fibrous or hairy covering of the stem is an extensive article of commerce in the countries in which it grows. It seems to have been used by the Brazilians from a very early period to form cables for the canoes navigating the Amazon. It is well adapted for this purpose, as it is light (the cables made of it not sinking in water) and very durable. It twists readily and firmly into cordage from the fibres being rough-edged, and as it is very abundant, and is procured and manufactured by the Indians, piassaba ropes are much cheaper than any other kind of cordage. The price in the city of Barra in June 1852, was 400 reis or 1s. for 32 lbs. of the fibre, and 800 reis or 2s. for every inch in circumference of a cable sixty fathoms long, which is the standard length they are all made to.

Before the independence of Brazil, the Portuguese government had a factory at the mouth of the Paduarí, one of the tributaries of the Rio Negro, for the purpose of making these cables for the use of the Pará arsenal, and as a government monopoly. Till within these few years the fibre was all manufactured into cordage on the spot, but it is now taken down in long conical bundles for exportation from Pará to England, where it is generally used for street sweeping and house brooms, and will probably soon be applied to many other purposes. It is cut with knives by men, women and children, from the upper part of the younger trees, so as to secure the freshest fibres, the taller trees which have only the old and half-rotten portion within reach, being left untouched. It is said to grow again in five or six years, the fibres being produced at the bases of the new leaves. The trees are much infested by venomous snakes, a species of Craspedocephalus, and the Indians are not unfrequently bitten by them when at work, and sometimes with fatal consequences.

The distribution of this tree is very peculiar. It grows in swampy or partially flooded lands on the banks of black-water rivers. It is first found on the river Padauarí, a tributary of the Rio Negro on its northern side, about 400 miles above Barra, but whose waters are not so black as those of the Rio Negro. The Piassaba is found from near the mouth to more than a hundred miles up, where it ceases. On the banks of the Rio Negro itself not a tree is to be seen. The next river, the Darahá, also contains some. The next two, the Maravihá and Cababurís, are white-water rivers, and have no Piassaba. On the S. bank, though all the rivers are black-water, there is no Piassaba till we reach the Marié, not far below St. Gabriel. Here it is extensively cut for about a hundred miles up, but there is still none immediately at the mouth or on the banks of the Rio Negro. The next rivers, the Curicuríarí, the great river Uaupés, and the Isánna, though all black-water, have none; while further on, in the Xié, it again appears. On entering Venezuela it is found near the banks of the Rio Negro, and is abundant all up to its sources, and in the Témi and Atabápo, black-water tributaries of the Orinoco. This seems to be its northern limit, and I cannot hear of its again appearing in any part of the Amazon or Orinoco or their tributaries. It is thus entirely restricted to a district about 300 miles from N. to S. and an equal distance from E. to W. I am enabled so exactly to mark out its range, from having resided more than two years in various parts of the Rio Negro, among people whose principal occupation consisted in obtaining the fibrous covering of this tree, and from whom no locality for it can have remained undiscovered, assisted as they are by the Indians, whose home is the forest, and who are almost as well acquainted with its trackless depths as we are with the well-beaten roads of our own island.

The fibre imported into this country has been supposed to be produced only by the Attalea funifera, a species not found in the Amazon district. In the London Journal of Botany for 1849, Sir W. Hooker gave some account of the material, and of the tree producing it; stating that he had received the fruit of the tree with the fibre from a mercantile house connected with Brazil, and that the fruit was that of the Attalea funifera. This species is mentioned by Martius as furnishing a fibre used for cordage and other purposes in Southern Brazil, and he states that it is called “piaçaba”; so that the Indian name is applied to two distinct trees producing a similar material in different localities; and the two having been brought to England under the same name and from not very distant ports of the same country, were naturally supposed to be produced by the same tree. The greater part, if not all of the Piassaba now imported, comes, however, from the Rio Negro, where several hundred tons are cut annually and sent to Pará, from which place scarcely a vessel sails for England without its forming a part of her cargo.

Genus Euterpe, Gærtner.

Male and female flowers intermingled on the same spadix, the former more abundant in the upper part of the branches, the latter in the lower. Spathe entire, membranaceous, fusiform and deciduous. Flowers with bracts, male with six stamens and a rudimentary pistil, female with three sessile stigmas. Spadix simply branched, spreading horizontally.

These are very elegant palms; their stems are lofty, slender, smooth and faintly ringed. The leaves are terminal, pinnate, regular, and form a graceful feathery plume. The bases of the petioles are sheathing for a long distance down the stem, forming a thick column three or four feet long, of a green or reddish colour. The spadices, three or four in number, spring from beneath the leaves, and the spathes are very deciduous, falling to the ground as soon as they open. The fruit is small, globose, at first green, then violet or black, and consists of a thin edible pulp covering the hard seed.

Twelve species are known, inhabiting the West Indies, Mexico and South America, and there appear to be three species in the Amazon district, two of which I have figured. Some prefer marshy grounds near the level of the sea, others extend up the mountains to a height of 4000 feet.

Pl. VII.
W. Fitch lith. Ford & West Imp.
EUTERPE OLERACEA. Ht. 60 Ft.

PLATE VII.
Euterpe oleracea, Martius.

Assaí, Lingoa Geral.

The Assaí of Pará is a tall and slender tree, from sixty to eighty feet high, and about four inches in diameter. The stem is very smooth, of a pale colour, and generally waving, sometimes very much curved. The leaves are of moderate size, of a pale bright green, regularly pinnate, and with the leaflets much drooping. The column formed by the sheathing bases of the leaves is of an olive colour. The flowers are small, whitish, and very thickly set on the simply branched spadix. There are generally two or three, and sometimes even five or six spadices, growing out horizontally from a little below the leaf-column. The spathe is smooth and membranous, and falls off as the spadix opens. The fruit when ripe is about the size and colour of a sloe. It consists of a hard albuminous seed, with a rather fibrous exterior, and a very thin covering of a firm pulp or flesh.

This species is very abundant in the neighbourhood of Pará, and even in the city itself. It grows in swamps flooded by the high tides,—never on dry land. Its straight cylindrical stem is sometimes used for poles and rafters; but the tree is generally considered too valuable to be cut down for such purposes. A very favourite drink is made from the ripe fruit, and daily vended in the streets of Pará. Indian and negro girls may be constantly seen walking about with small earthen pots on their heads, uttering at intervals a shrill cry of Assaí——í. If you call one of these dusky maidens, she will set down her pot, and you will see it filled with a thick creamy liquid, of a fine plum colour. A pennyworth of this will fill a tumbler, and you may then add a little sugar to your taste, and will find a peculiar nut-flavoured liquid, which you may not perhaps think a great deal of at first; but, if you repeat your experience a few times, you will inevitably become so fond of it as to consider “Assaí” one of the greatest luxuries the place produces. It is generally taken with farinha, the substitute for bread prepared from the mandiocca root, and with or without sugar, according to the taste of the consumer.

During our walks in the suburbs of Pará we had frequently opportunities of seeing the preparation of this favourite beverage. Two or three large bunches of fruit are brought in from the forest. The women of the house seize upon them, shake and strip them into a large earthen vessel, and pour on them warm water, not too hot to bear the hand in. The water soon becomes tinged with purple, and in about an hour the outer pulp has become soft enough to rub off. The water is now most of it poured away, a little cold added, and a damsel, with no sleeves to turn up, plunges both hands into the vessel, and rubs and kneads with great perseverance, adding fresh water as it is required, till the whole of the purple covering has been rubbed off and the greenish stones left bare. The liquid is now poured through a wicker sieve into another vessel, and is then ready for use. The smiling hostess will then fill a calabash, and give you another with farinha to mix to your taste; and nothing will delight her more than your emptying your rustic basin and asking her to refill it.

The inhabitants of Pará are excessively attached to this beverage, and many never pass a day of their lives without it. They are particularly favoured too, in being able to get it at all seasons, for though in most places the trees only bear for a few months once in the year, yet in the neighbourhood of Pará there is so much variety of soil and aspect, that within a day or two’s journey, there is always some ripe Assaí to supply the market. Boys climb up the trees to get it, with a cord round the ankles (as shown on the Plate), and with its own leaves make a neatly interlaced basket to carry it home. From the great island of Marajó, its igaripés[^[1]] and marshes, from the rivers Guamá and Mojú, from the thousand islands in the river, and from the vast palm swamps in the depths of the forest, baskets of the fruit are brought every morning to the city, where half the population look to the Assaí to supply a daily meal, and hundreds are said to make it, with farinha, almost their main subsistence.

[1]. A small stream, literally “path of the canoe.”

The trees of this genus also furnish another article of food. The undeveloped leaves in the centre of the column form a white sweetish mass, which when boiled somewhat resembles artichoke or parsnep, and is a very good and wholesome vegetable. It may also be eaten raw, cut up and dressed as a salad with oil and vinegar. As, however, to obtain it the tree must be destroyed, it is not much used in Pará, except by travellers in the forest who have no particular interest in the preservation of the trees for fruit. The Cabbage Palm of the West Indies is an allied species, and is used for food in the same manner.

Very fine specimens of this tree may be seen in the great Palm House at Kew, where they grow almost as luxuriantly as in their native forests.

In the Plate, the unopened spathe, flower-spadix and fruit are represented, as they are often found, together on the same tree.