8th.—I have much to tell you, dear Mamma, of all that we have seen and done this day; some of it quite out of our usual course, for we went to see a magnificent place, about nine miles from hence, belonging to Lord S——. My uncle, Mr. Lumley, and my cousins, rode, except Frederick, who came in the carriage with the ladies. The grounds and woods are extensive; but the gardens, stove, and conservatory, are remarkably fine, and were our chief object. Few private gardens have such a collection of the palm tribe, and of South American plants. I saw many of my old Brazilian friends; and moreover many plants and trees from Brazil, and the neighbouring countries, of which I was quite ignorant.
The house where the palms are kept was built on purpose for them, of an uncommon height; and Lord S—— has endeavoured to arrange the numerous specimens, as well as he could, according to Humboldt’s division of the tribe: the first, those which grow in dry places or inland plains, such as the fan-palm; secondly, those on the sea coast, as the cocoa-nut, &c.; next, the palms which flourish at the elevation of 1400 to 3000 yards above the sea, and which were unknown till Humboldt’s visit to the Andes; and, fourthly, those of fresh-water marshes, as the Mauritia palm. This is the sago-tree of South America; it extends along the swamps as far inland as the sources of the Oroonoko, and supplies the inhabitants with flour. In the season of the inundations, these clumps of mauritia appear as if rising from the bosom of the waters. They serve as habitations for a tribe of wretched Indians; and as they grow in great abundance in the low grounds of the Delta, at the mouth of the Oroonoko, strangers sailing up the river at night are astonished at seeing the tops of the trees illuminated by large fires. The poor natives suspend strong mats between the trunks of the trees, and fill them with moist clay, on which they kindle the fire necessary for their household wants. These people have preserved their independence, and probably owe it to the quaking and swampy soil which they alone know how to pass over, to their dwellings in the trees.
This mauritia palm is called the Tree of Life by the missionaries; for it not only affords the Indian a safe dwelling, but supplies him with food and wine, and cordage. Its fruit and farinaceous pith supply food—its saccharine juice ferments into wine, and the fibres of the leaf-stalks furnish thread fit for weaving hammocks, or twisting into ropes. How very singular, Mamma, to see a whole nation of human creatures depending on one single species of palm-tree for their existence!
We had much conversation about the various species of palms which we saw; and particularly the real sago-tree, which grows in the East, and which exceeds all other plants in the quantity of nutriment it affords to mankind. My uncle told me that a single tree, in its fifteenth year, sometimes yields six hundred pounds weight of sago or meal; for the word sago signifies meal, in the dialect of Amboyna. Mr. Lumley said that, as these trees grow about ten feet asunder, an English acre could contain four hundred and thirty-five of them; and, supposing their average produce to be only one third of what my uncle mentioned, it would amount to eight thousand seven hundred pounds yearly of meal, from each acre. This, he said, was three times as much as would be considered a good crop of corn in this country. Sago is collected from five different palms, but not in the same abundance as from the real sago-tree.
We then examined some fine specimens of the date-tree, so famous in all our Eastern tales, and so delightful to all travellers. Mr. Lumley has often seen it near Lisbon, where it grows well; but the fruit never ripens perfectly in Europe. It is found in great abundance in Africa, and particularly on the borders of the vast desert of Sahara, where the parched sandy soil is so unfit for the production of corn. But the date-tree supplies the deficiency, and furnishes the inhabitants with almost the whole of their subsistence. Forests of this most useful palm may be seen there, of several leagues in circumference: their extent, however, depends on the quantity of water that can be procured, as they require constant moisture. The Arabs say these trees are very long lived; and there is scarcely any part of them which they do not make useful. The wood, though of a spongy texture, lasts such a number of years, that they say it is incorruptible; most of their instruments of husbandry are made of it; and though it burns slowly, it gives out great heat. The Arabs strip the bark and fibrous parts from the young trees, and eat the substance in the inside of the stalk. It is nourishing and sweet, and is called the marrow of the date-tree. They eat also the young leaves, with lemon-juice; and the old ones are dried, and used for making mats, baskets, and many other articles, with which they carry on a considerable trade. From the stumps of the branches arise a great number of delicate filaments, of which ropes, and even a coarse cloth, are manufactured.
Indeed I believe all the palms are very useful, even the humble dwarf fan-palm, which we saw also in this collection, and which Mr. Lumley says is very plentiful in Algarve, the southern province of Portugal; it seldom grows more than three or four feet high, though the stem is thick: its fan-shaped leaves are used for making the baskets in which the dried figs are packed; and its young shoots are eaten as vegetables.
But I was surprised not to see in this collection the silk-thread palm, that celebrated tree which you and I have had the pleasure of seeing in its own country, with its beautiful, long, serrated leaves, composed of innumerable fibres, both finer and stronger than silk, and of which the fishing-nets are sometimes made. How useful it would be if this tree could be induced to grow in England—and how my uncle and aunt would laugh at me if they saw this sentence!
We returned by a different road, and I enjoyed the day very much; the drive was in itself so pleasant, and it is so satisfactory to see any thing new with people who have real knowledge like my companions, and who are alive to the pleasure of seeing what is curious. The Miss Lumleys have seen very little, they have seldom been out of the forest in their lives; yet they are not at all ignorant. They told me that they have not much time for reading, but that what little knowledge they have, has been acquired by the conversation of their father and mother.
Mrs. Lumley is rather silent in company; she seems to have much tenderness, mixed with a firm mind—and though always cheerful, she looks as if she had suffered a great deal. I imagine they are in confined circumstances, for she said to-day that till the morning they came here she had not been for many years in a carriage.
9th. Sunday.—After breakfast this morning my uncle conversed a little with us about the Epistles of St. Paul, which I had been saying were very difficult to understand; he remarked, “that if we attended to the long parentheses that St. Paul makes, and in which his energy and warmth sometimes seem to carry him away, we might easily connect the chain of his argument. But,” said he, “there are other causes of occasional obscurity. One is the nature of epistolary composition, leading the writer to refer to personal and local circumstances, and particularly to conversations, which were well known to those whom he addressed, and therefore not needing explanation to them. Another arises from the many allusions to peculiar laws and customs that were familiar to his readers, but requiring much research to comprehend them now. There is a third, and a very important circumstance, which is a source of frequent perplexity to commentators, and which, in some degree, affects all the writings of the New Testament, particularly those parts where doctrines are taught rather than facts detailed. Our great philosopher, Locke, alludes to this difficulty: he somewhere observes, that the subjects treated of in the Epistles are so wholly new, and their doctrines so different from the notions that mankind had previously adopted, that many of the most important terms have a different signification from what the same Greek words bear in the heathen authors. Indeed it is obvious that the common Greek language of the day could not furnish accurate expressions for doctrines either entirely new, or derived from the Mosaic law, and the writings of the Jewish prophets. Hence the writers of the New Testament were obliged to employ Greek words, whose meanings were determined rather by analogy, than by their original derivation; and to combine them according to the idioms of the Hebrew and Syriac languages, rather than by the natural construction of Grecian phraseology.