The cherry-like fruits are dull orange or brick red with rather dry fleshy or oily exocarp having a rather mealy though distinctly acid flavor, but no really unpleasant taste. This fleshy covering is only very slightly fibrous, and that near the base; the seeds fall off very easily sometimes leaving the base of the exocarp attached to the fruiting branch. The nut is about 12 mm. in greatest or transverse diameter and about 10 mm. high, while the fresh fruit is 14–16 mm. through and 12 or 13 mm. thick. The surface is deeply and irregularly pitted and marked with three radially fibrous striate foveolae.
It is perhaps too soon to assert that there is only one species of the present genus in Puerto Rico. The trees certainly differ considerably in size though not more than the cocoanut and others. There is also a noticeable difference in the abundance of spines. Such apparent variability may, however, be due to age, the older trees tending to become less densely beset with the brittle black spines which are often conspicuous on young specimens.
The specimens (no. 878) and photographs on which this genus and species were based were secured on the limestone hills near the wagon road between Bayamon and Toa Baja where the present palm is not uncommon.
Curima appeared to be especially abundant about Bayamon but is probably rather generally distributed in the limestone hills of the island, perhaps also on other soils. A few trees were seen along the road between Utuado and Lares, and numerous others between Isolina and Manati. Sintenis collected specimens of what is apparently the same species near Juncos and Hato Grande, and at Maricao young specimens discussed under Bactris acanthophylla.
As far as Puerto Rico is concerned, this palm is very easily recognized by means of the curiously truncate leaf-divisions, the outer margins of which appear as though accidentally injured or eaten away by caterpillars. This feature is, however, shared with numerous other West Indian and South American palms, though apparently only one, the so-called grigri palm of Martinique can be referred to the present genus with confidence. For this the name Curima corallina (Martinezia corallina Martius, Hist. Nat. Palm. 3: 284) appears to be correct, although Martius places Gaertner’s much older Bactris minima as a synonym for his species. Gaertner, however, was making a second attempt at renaming Jacquin’s Bactris minor, having previously misplaced that name in connection with a West Indian Acrocomia, probably the same to which Jacquin had already supplied the name Cocos aculeatus. Thus it is possible to treat Bactris minima Gaertner as a synonym of Bactris minor Jacquin and the restoration of Gaertner’s inappropriate name for the Curima is thus avoided.
With this preliminary description we may return to the consideration of the generic names Martinezia, Aiphanes and Marara which other writers have applied to relatives of the present palm or treated as synonyms. Martinezia was described by Ruiz and Pavon (Prodr. Flor. Per. et Chil. 148. 1794) for five Peruvian palms, but it was amended by Martius (Hist. Nat. Palm. 3: 283) by the removal of all the original species and the substitution of a new set. Of the original species studied by Ruiz and Pavon only two, M. ciliata and M. abrupta were mentioned in connection with the original description of the genus, and this because they offered exceptions to the generic characters. If these were to be excluded for this reason from those among which the type is to be sought, the name Martinezia must go with the subsequently published M. ensiformis, now referred to Euterpe[[6]] or with M. lanceolata and M. linearis, now placed in Chamaedorea. If we hold to the first species, M. ciliata, Martinezia is probably a synonym of Bactris. The second species, M. abrupta, has escaped Martius and the Index Kewensis, in which a sixth name M. interrupta is the only one by Ruiz and Pavon now credited as being a genuine Martinezia. Thus by the method of elimination Martinezia would according to current classification replace Chamaedorea while by the method of types it would stand as a synonym of Bactris.
The genus Aiphanes was established by Willdenow on Aiphanes aculeata, a spiny palm from the mountains about Caracas. The trunk is said to be erect, ten meters high, subcylindrical and very spiny. The leaves are about 1.6 m. long, with four pairs of remote, broad, cuneate, praemorse pinnae, strongly whitish pubescent on the under side; the petiole is also beset with spines. Spathe acuminate at both ends, aculeate on the outside, smooth within, opening longitudinally; spadix 4.5 dm. long, composed of cylindrical spikes placed opposite. Flowers hermaphrodite; calyx trifid, the divisions acute; petals acuminate; filaments 6, subulate, anthers rounded, style as long as the stamens, stigma trifid; drupe globose, the fleshy farinaceous pulp rather tasteless, though edible; nut hard, of the size of a musket ball, unilocular, black, furrowed with a large number of grayish grooves, of which three are always much larger than the others. The kernel is white, very sweet, and very good to eat. Aiphanes grows in the ravines and forests of the high mountains of the district of Caucagua, province of Caracas, Venezuela and requires a fertile, somewhat moist soil. It flowers and fruits in July.
From the above it appears that Aiphanes is a genus quite different from Curima, approaching some of the South American species of Bactris much more closely than it resembles the Puerto Rico tree.
The genus Marara was based by Karsten (Linnaea, 28: 389) on M. bicuspidata from Colombia, a cespitose palm having a trunk 7 meters high and 10 cm. in diameter, clothed with black spines 6 to 8 mm. long. The leaves are 125 cm. long with from 60 to 80 pairs of cuneate pinnules which measure 3 dm. in length and 15 cm. in width, and are clustered in sixes or eights. This appears to be a very extreme development of the leaf-arrangement seen in the cultivated palm commonly called Martinezia caryotaefolia where the leaflets are distinctly clustered, but by no means so crowded as must be the case when on the side of a leaf 125 cm. long are leaflets with an aggregate width of 10–13 m.
The palm commonly cultivated in conservatories as Martinezia caryotaefolia is obviously allied to Curima, perhaps more closely than to either Aiphanes or Marara, but in addition to the clustered pinnules it has a more slender habit, especially apparent in the long internodes and the more lax inflorescence. This difference in habit is also evidently correlated with the fact that the leaf-bases do not become deeply gibbous and obliquely inclined from the trunk as in Curima but remain closely sheathing. Moreover, the upper side of the leaf-stalk which in the Puerto Rico palm is deeply channeled and has lateral corners sharp or torn into fibers nearly to the insertion of the lowest pinnae is in the conservatory species nearly cylindrical for a long distance below the pinnae, and has long spines on the upper side as well as on the lower. It is as though the ligule were located in Curima near the insertion of the lowest pinnae while in the other form it remains close to the trunk, with a cylindrical section intercalated to reach to where the pinnae begin. Apparently we are dealing with still another generic group for which the name Tilmia would not be inappropriate in allusion to the shorn and disheveled appearance which it shares with Curima. The species studied are Tilmia caryotaefolia (Martinezia caryotaefolia H.B.K. Nov. Gen. et Sp. I: 305. pl. 699) in the National Botanic Garden and T. disticha (Martinezia disticha Linden, Cat. 32. 1875).