YOUNG PALMS IN THE BOTANIC GARDEN.
While he was giving them some of the details concerning it they arrived at the entrance, and passed within the gates. Magnificent collections of palms of different kinds, bamboos with trunks a foot in diameter, and growing in great clusters, as though a dozen of them came from a single root, green and flowering plants almost without number, nutmeg and cinnamon trees, tea and coffee plants, and hundreds of other botanical curiosities were passed in rapid succession. Mr. Walker called attention to the palms for which Ceylon is celebrated, and described their peculiarities. "You doubtless know all about the cocoa-nut palm," said he, "as you have just come from the sea-coast where it flourishes, but the Palmyra palm may be new to you. It is to the north of Ceylon what the cocoa-nut palm is to the south, as it furnishes food, clothing, and shelter to the inhabitants."
One of the boys asked if it bore the same kind of fruit as the trees of the sea-coast.
"There is a resemblance between the products of the two trees," was the reply, "but they are not the same. The Palmyra grows to seventy or eighty feet high, and the stem is nearly always straight, and ends in a tuft of fan-shaped leaves, with clusters of fruit as large as a cocoa-nut, but rounder. There are six or seven of these clusters, with ten to twenty fruit in a cluster, and each fruit contains three seeds or kernels filled with a white pulp that is eaten fresh, or can be dried and kept for any length of time. If the kernels are planted, they throw off sprouts the size of parsnips; these sprouts can be eaten fresh, or dried in the sun, and the natives make various dishes from them, and also an excellent farina which forms the food of a great many people.
"The timber is very valuable, as it is one of the few woods the white ants will not eat, and it is used for a great many purposes; the leaves are fashioned into many useful things, and the chief use of the tree is for producing the coarse sugar that is made from its juice, in the same manner as from the cocoa-nut palm. It is a curious circumstance that the two trees will not flourish in the same region, and that both are nearly equally valuable to mankind. In the neighborhood of Jaffna, in the north of the island, there are more than six millions of these Palmyra-trees, and they support a great number of people."
INDIA-RUBBER-TREE.
Many of the palm-trees in the gardens were covered with vines and creeping plants; one of them, known as the beetle-vine, was full of bright blossoms that made a sharp contrast to the dark-green foliage. There were several specimens of the India-rubber-tree, and Frank remarked that one of them reminded him of an American elm, with its wide-spreading branches, and its apparent fondness for the house near which it stood.